Less than half of IT organizations are increasing IT staff headcount this year, according to the Computer Economics’ annual IT spending and staffing benchmarks study. The survey collects data from more than 200 IT organizations in the US and Canada on the IT budget and staffing plans for the current year.

Forty-six percent of all companies in the study plan to increase IT headcount, down from 52% of survey respondents in 2014 and 50% in 2015. However, only 19% are planning to actually cut staffing levels, and 35% plan no change in headcount.

“Economic uncertainty makes it difficult for companies to be more aggressive in hiring new IT staff members,” said Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. “At the same time, virtualization and cloud services are making IT personnel more efficient, which softens the effect.”

For the most part, IT departments still deploy staff the same way they have in the recent past, with the staffing mix holding relatively constant, according to the study. The largest portion of IT staff is dedicated to application development and maintenance, representing about a quarter of the staff. The next largest portion of staff is IT managers, with more than 10%, and help desk workers at 9%.

While app developers and maintenance workers continue to grow in the IT department, server support headcount has seen a steady decrease in the last five years, from 12.1% of the total IT staff in 2012 to just 8.0% this year. Computer Economics attributes this decline to several factors, including increasing use of virtualization and automation tools that improve data center staff productivity as well as the shifting of data center workloads to the cloud.

No other positions showed a noticeable long-term trend up or down.