In 2024, we saw a new and not-quite-welcome trend in IT staffing: stagnation. Historically one segment of the industry that could be all but counted on for growth, IT staffing tread water for  close to the entire year. In the December 2024 IT Staffing Report, we dug into data from our most recent Pulse survey to explore how this sideways trend has played out and what companies in the space have been doing to adjust.

Going into 2025, SIA believes — like the Pulse survey respondents — that there are reasons for optimism and that flat is not the “new growth.” For one thing, global spending on IT continues to rise quickly and outpace overall economic expansion. For another, there is continued churn throughout many areas of the IT labor market, especially with the disruption caused by AI. Where there’s investment and change, there’s always opportunity.

Here are four areas where the biggest changes are expected in 2025:

Cybersecurity. In the last two years, cyberattacks have increased significantly, both in terms of frequency and complexity. With use of GenAI becoming more advanced and more common, this trend is only expected to intensify as the barriers to launching sophisticated attacks decrease. In a Gartner survey of over 2,450 CIOs, cybersecurity ranked the highest among areas in which respondents expected increased investment, cited by 80%. Cybersecurity even edged out business and intelligence and data analytics as the greatest area of expected investment.

What’s more, Cyberseek estimates that there is only enough talent in the US to fill 83% of these jobs and that these roles (including SOC analysts, penetration testers, cloud security engineers and data privacy officers) generally take 20% longer to fill than other positions. Staffing companies have an opportunity not only to fill cybersecurity roles, but to help fill them faster.

Machine learning and other AI. Data from Indeed’s Hiring Lab show that — when it comes to AI — the hype cycle is real. In early 2022 following the initial release of ChatGPT, there was a big spike in the number of job postings that contained terms related to AI and GenAI — from about 2% of jobs to 3% of jobs. That percentage fell by mid-2022 but continues to tick back up, with about 2.4% of job postings containing these terms at the end of 2024.

Companies continue to look for ways that AI can bring more fundamental efficiencies to their organizations, and they are currently doing this largely through smaller test cases. Right now, companies need very highly skilled talent with the knowledge and experience to drive these projects, and they are becoming more strategic in the roles they are looking for. Data from SIA’s US IT Staffing and Solutions Benchmarking Survey Summary: First Half 2024 shed some light on which roles these are. Machine learning engineers are definitely in the highest demand, followed by workers skilled in natural language processing, data science and robotics.

Big data, analytics and business intelligence. One step below GenAI and on the software value curve, big data is critical to powering all types of AI and it is also the driving force behind modern analytics and business intelligence practices. Data from Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey puts a little light on the size and scale, with SQL and Python being the only two programming languages that continue to grow despite already having more than 20,000 users. Python was also the most desired language, in part due to its use by such in-demand workers as data engineers, BI developers and database administrators.

Cloud Computing. Even though cloud computing has been an area of growth for IT staffing for some time now, there’s still room for expansion in this area. Organizations continue to increase their use of cloud to enable big data, machine learning, genAI and use of the Internet of Things — all big trends that are only accelerating. IT professionals who can manage and optimize cloud environments remain in high demand, including cloud architects, DevOps engineers, cloud security engineers and database and systems administrators.

For more information about these and other growth opportunities in IT staffing, see SIA’s recently published report IT Staffing: Growth Themes in the New World 2024.

If you are looking for updated benchmarks or more specific insights, also consider participating in our bi-monthly Pulse survey or annual benchmarking surveys, including the Staffing Industry Benchmarking Consortium, to receive full proprietary reports with benchmarks and insights that can help propel your business forward. (Note that the Pulse survey and annual Largest and Fastest-Growing Lists are open to all staffing companies, but the Staffing Industry Benchmarking Consortium is only open to SIA corporate members.)