The unemployment rate for tech occupations dipped to 1.8 percent in June, a notable decline from 2.1 percent in May.
The tech unemployment rate is also well below the overall national unemployment rate of 3.6 percent. According to CompTIA, which crunched data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employers posted some 505,663 open tech jobs in June, a year-over-year rise of 62 percent.
“The stronger than expected job gains reaffirm the critical role of tech across every sector and every business in the economy,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. “It also highlights the limitations in projecting company-specific hiring practices to the broader tech workforce.”
Find out which industries currently have the highest demand for tech professionals like you in Dice's latest Tech Job Report.
In other words, some of the doom-and-gloom headlines you might have seen recently—big companies like Meta slowing or freezing hiring, Tesla unleashing layoffs—aren’t necessarily indicative of the tech industry as a whole. Although some companies are facing significant headwinds due to their strategic focus or their revenue source (it’s been a bad few months for cryptocurrency-related companies, for example), organizations everywhere still need lots of technologists for everything from running websites to ensuring the tech stack is secure from internal and external threats.
It’s also helpful to note that the need for technologists extends well beyond the tech industry itself. Virtually every corner of the economy, from agriculture to manufacturing, needs technologists who can do all sorts of things. Given the general reliance on data analytics and cloud-based applications, virtually every organization has a significant tech aspect.
High demand for certain tech roles has also helped elevate compensation. The recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed that technologists who specialize in “hot” technologies such as cloud, blockchain, cybersecurity, and data can pull down six-figure salaries. According to the most recent Dice Salary Report, the average technologist salary currently stands at $104,566, with a 6.9 percent increase between 2020 and 2021; for specializations such as database administrator and systems architect, compensation climbs still higher.
Of course, organizations aren’t hiring just anyone; to land these prime positions, you’ll need the right mix of experience and skills. But for technologists who have mastered their craft, there are likely good career opportunities out there.
