Amid political and economic uncertainty, IT temporary staffing market growth in the US decelerated to 4% in 2016 from the more robust growth of prior years. In our April forecast update, we project growth to slightly accelerate through 2018 as the economic backdrop improves, alleviating companies’ budgetary constraints and thus allowing them to increase spend on attractive IT investments.

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Behind the overall market growth, however, is notable divergence by company. One trend evident among publicly traded staffing firms is generalist firms and legacy IT suppliers ceding market share to tech-specialist firms that have maintained focus on innovation around their recruiting and delivery platforms. The specialist firms best positioned to continue growing at above forecasted rates are those that are adapting their talent pools and subject matter expertise to align with demand shifts toward emerging IT disciplines. Such disciplines exhibiting strong demand include cloud computing, data science and analysis, cybersecurity, and application development. Occupations exhibiting weaker demand include help desk/PC support and software QA testing.

Overall, demand for IT professionals is expected to remain high and supply should remain inadequate for several years, potentially more so should immigration policies become more restrictive. Such an environment should be conducive to keeping the IT staffing market at record levels, though anything more than mild growth at such levels will be challenging.