Employment Trends in Technology
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have all recently trimmed their workforces. In total, these four companies employ just under two million workers – but they make up a huge portion of the tech hiring market. Despite job cuts in tech, initial unemployment claims (a proxy for layoffs) are still falling, and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low. The overall labor market remains strong while the tech world is undergoing a transformation.
Information, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) category containing several tech-like industries, lost 5,000 jobs in December. This could signal a softening in demand for tech workers, the short-term impact of the Big Tech layoffs, or a combination of the two. Professional and business services, another category containing tech positions, lost 6,000 jobs in December.
Despite job losses in the core BLS sectors, key subsectors of information and professional and business services experienced strong growth. For instance, consulting and software developers added 8,300 and 5,600 new jobs, respectively. The major job losses in information came largely from subsectors not pictured in the chart below: “motion picture and sound recording industries” (–13,000) and telecommunications (-2,500), rather than the traditional tech-related roles.
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