Overall IT Employment Improves Slightly; Finance and Insurance IT Still Down

If the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed by Janco Associates Inc. is any indication, information technology professionals are not seeing open positions in the insurance industry.

While the most recent data shows 58,300 IT jobs have been added overall in the last 12 months; the finance and insurance industry saw a loss of 23,000 IT jobs.

Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said the overall IT job market will be soft for at least one more quarter, and there will be more churn in IT staff as CIOs accelerate their move to more flexible staffing models and cloud computing. CIOs are outsourcing more technical work, including managed IP services such as VoIP and VPNs. They are hiring more contractors for desktop and security services, and they are putting more applications such as remote backup in the cloud. At the same time, they are looking to hire IT people with business and analytical skills, such as risk management and project management.

CIOs report that they're having trouble hiring IT people because either they can't find IT professionals with the right business skills or they can't afford them, Janulaitis said.