The Job Market: January 2012
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, and his views on the job market.
“I have been blogging about the job market in the US and around the world since August 2001.”
What I write is not designed to be political or critical; it is observations and my sense of where we are and where we are going.
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Last month, I wrote:
We are not out of the woods yet but there is progress with the job market.
First of all, it is not in the lower unemployment rate. I expect many of those jobs will be shown to be seasonal workers hired for Christmas. After all, when a single retailer announces 5000 new part time workers being hired for the holiday season as one did, others were thinking the same thing. The question will be how many will be kept after January begins.
Well that shoe dropped with a “surprising” rise in jobless claims. Well, seasonal workers do get fired, don’t they.
Soon, the government will be surprised by another increase but just know that Home depot announced that they were going to hire 70000 seasonal workers in Florida (hurricane season).
This is where we are right now– in the broad job market in general, there are three categories of workers doing “well”–seasonal workers, consultants and IT professionals . . . and the latter two categories overlap a lot.
It professionals are in short supply in many parts of the country and will remain so because the impact of a recession on the labor force like IT is felt a few years later.
Follow me on this.
I believe in 2003, the US reduced the number of H-1b recipients from approximately 210000 to 65000. Most of these were IT professionals. That means for each year, the country lost access to 145000 people entering IT (or 1.16 million people for the past 8 years), paying taxes, buying houses and writing code.
Now add on top of this the fact that beginning in 2009, ALMOST NO ONE who graduated college was able to get a job (some are now, but you get my point) and the result is a huge gap in the workforce that will drive salaries up again very soon.
After all, we are seeing high demand for staff level positions (developers, software engineers), IT architects and program managers nationally, particularly in consulting that won;t change any time soon. Some of these firms are starting to increase their salary ranges already.
As for seasonal workers, I noted an uptick beginning in October for Christmas as retailers and UPS started to hire in advance of the holidays. Firms are managing costs with seasonal underemployed workers.
But when employment data for January is released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, remember that January is amonth where the government model actually reduces jobs so the numbers have adownward bias to them.
No matter, things are starting to improve and people are starting to return to work.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter publishes “No B.S. Job Search Advice Ezine” and broadcasts “No B.S. Job Search Advice Radio” Mondays at 9 AM Eastern on BlogTalkRadio.com. Receive a complimentary subscriptoin to “No B.S. Job Search Advice Ezine at www.JeffAltman.com.
Copyright 2012 Jeff Altman
