IT Employment Continues Recovery in February

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- IT employment continued to grow in February according to TechServe Alliance, a collaboration of IT services firms, clients, consultants and suppliers.

IT employment stood at more than 3.8 million jobs last month, reflecting a strong .37 percent increase over the previous month. The February increase follows on the heels of a 0.3 percent increase in IT employment in January.  Despite strong sequential growth the last two months, on a year-over-year basis, IT employment is still about 3 percent lower than it was in February 2009.

After peaking in November 2008, IT employment continued to drop through August 2009.  Subsequently, IT employment had remained essentially flat until January's increase.  

"Following January's encouraging IT employment report, February's accelerating growth strongly suggests last month's positive numbers were not an anomaly" observed Mark Roberts, CEO of TechServe Alliance.

"Posting an increase of over 25,000 IT jobs during the first two months of the year is both heartening and a positive harbinger for the future. I believe the data reflects renewed optimism among business leaders as they reverse recession-driven cutbacks and tackle critical IT projects that had been temporarily shelved.  We expect to see an improving environment for both IT services and their affiliated professionals as the year unfolds," commented Roberts.  

For complete Index please visit: http://www.techservealliance.org/documents/Indexreleasefeb2010.pdf

Technical note: TechServe Alliance's IT Employment Index is the first, specific measurement of IT employment. This unique measurement of total IT employment is created monthly by studying the ongoing staffing patterns of a dozen IT and computer-related occupations in 16 industries and industry sectors employing significant numbers of IT workers including the manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial, information services, business and professional services, and education and health industries. The monthly IT Employment Index is based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, which is subject to monthly revisions, and therefore, the Index is revised accordingly. The IT Employment Index is also subject to annual revisions and was benchmarked this month (February 2010) with the publication of the BLS January 2010 employment report, which included revisions to several years of employment data.

SOURCE TechServe Alliance