The unemployment rate for tech occupations dipped to 1.8 percent in December, lower than the national unemployment rate of 3.5 percent, according to the latest analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data by CompTIA.

Across industries, employers hired roughly 130,000 tech professionals last month. In-demand tech roles included software developers and engineers (accounting for around 30 percent of December’s open tech job postings), IT project managers, IT support specialists, and systems and network engineers.

“Another wave of positive tech employment data speaks to the many moving parts of a complex labor market,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. “Despite the layoffs there continues to be more employers hiring tech talent than shedding it.”

According to CompTIA’s analysis, roughly 30 percent of tech job postings involve emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.). No matter what the state of the job market, mastering emerging tech skills can give you an advantage when hunting for a new, potentially lucrative position.

Over the past several weeks, some of the nation’s largest tech companies have announced major layoffs. For example, Salesforce plans to shed 10 percent of its staff and shut down offices; Meta, Uber, Amazon, Cisco, and Twitter have also cut their workforces, and others such as Micron and Tesla may follow suit in coming months.

But Big Tech doesn’t represent the totality of the tech industry. Even as Silicon Valley giants retrench, organizations across the economy still need tech professionals who can do everything from maintaining websites and IT stacks to building sophisticated ML models. That’s one key reason why the tech unemployment rate has steadily declined from 2.2 percent in October to 2 percent in November before hitting 1.8 percent by the end of the year. Whatever 2023 may hold, it’s clear that tech professionals are still in demand.