Amidst the wrenching changes and disruption of 2020, there was one clear winner: digital transformation projects and the accompanying demand for IT talent across nearly all industries and business sizes. This has been a boon for nimble IT staffing suppliers that have displayed considerable resilience in their business models and financial results. IT staffing revenue was up a median 7% year over year in January, according to our most recent US Staffing Industry Pulse Survey, the fourth straight month of positive growth. As the IT staffing market continues to grow, we thought it would be useful in this article to take a back-to-basics look at the seven key occupational categories in the IT segment that will shape the IT workforce now and into the future.
There are seven occupational categories that describe roughly 90% of IT jobs filled by staffing firms, according to the Standard Occupational Classification system used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and shown in the table below. The categories accounted for 238,000 temporary workers in 2019, according to SIA estimates, and we highlight some features of these occupations in the paragraphs below. More detailed data can be found in SIA’s 2021 Staffing Occupational Markets Guidebook.
Key occupations in IT staffing, May 2019 (Source: BLS and SIA)
(Click chart to enlarge)
Software developers and QA testers represents the largest category of IT staffing, accounting for roughly 68,000 workers, or 30% of all IT temporary workers. Not only is this the largest category, but it is forecast to be one of the fastest-growing job categories (+21.5%) in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 10-year employment projections. As a core category of the IT segment, SIA published an in-depth report on software developers to examine the key job trends across programming languages, frameworks, databases and platforms.
Computer user support jobs, encompassing various “help desk” and technical support jobs, is the second-largest category, accounting for 53,000 temporary IT workers. This category has lower pay rates (average hourly rate of $25.13 in 2019) and may be easier to recruit than other IT categories. Significantly, we estimate a temp penetration rate of 8.2%, one of the highest of the group, that indicates for every 100 computer user support workers, eight of them are working via an IT staffing firm.
The last category we will highlight is information security analysts, accounting for roughly 10,000 temporary IT workers. Demand remains very high for this fast-growing category, with average hourly pay rates of $50.11 making it the second-highest compensated role (after only computer network architects). Job growth is expected to sizzle over the next decade as the BLS projects 31.2% growth, by far the fastest of any IT category.
The above categories can provide a useful tool for IT staffing firms to benchmark their operations and books of business, as IT staffing executives seek to map out areas of strength and weakness in terms of their candidate attraction, recruiting metrics, and placements and re-deployments. IT staffing firms can use these categories to fine-tune their niche strategies, and also guide their investment of resources and staff in order to maximize their engagement with the global pool of IT talent.
