Photo: Romolo Tavani – shutterstock.com
At first glance, the situation appears bleak. Tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are laying off staff in droves, and growth rates are declining in many business areas. Classic hardware providers, for example in the PC market, are suffering from massive sales slumps.
However, US market researchers argue that this is only a small part of the market. Most IT experts are not employed by the “Big Techs”, but in companies in a wide variety of industries. And the numbers are different there.
According to surveys by the market research company CompTIA, almost 6.5 million people in the US currently work in tech jobs, 430,000 more than a year ago. The unemployment rate in this segment is 1.5 percent, compared to 3.4 percent in the market as a whole.
In a recent IDC study, 82 percent of the technology managers surveyed were expecting a recession in the current year. But 62 percent also stated that their company would spend as much or even more money on technology compared to the previous year.
The industrial group Johnson Controls, for example, is sticking to its digital initiatives. In 2022, he added around 500 software engineers and other IT experts to his 2,500-strong tech team, and another 350 employees are to be added. “We need to keep investing,” says CTO Vijay Sankaran. The company’s growth plans cannot be realized without technology.
The major bank JP Morgan Chase has a tech team of 55,000 employees, 5,000 more than before the corona pandemic. Above all, experts from the fields of cloud computing, data science, artificial intelligence and cyber security were hired. According to CIO Lori Beer, the IT workforce will also be expanded in selected fields in 2023.
The large IT market research companies IDC and Gartner have corrected their growth forecasts for a number of markets downwards. However, investments in software in particular should remain at a high level. According to Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock, spending on software is growing worldwide in every industry. He even calls the trend “recession proof”. His colleague Stephen Minton from IDC is a little more cautious: Corporate tech investments are not immune to an economic downturn, but are “more resilient than they have ever been.”
