Demand up for technology graduates

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:51:14 -0400
jobs, news

USA Today has an article on the increased recruiting by technology companies, Tech jobs boom like it's 1999. Potential employees are being lured with good salaries, bonuses, and perks, and some predict that almost 150,000 technology jobs will be added in 2011.

"Nearly 150,000 tech jobs are expected to be added this year, says Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. In February, there were about 6.1 million tech jobs in the U.S., up 2.4% from a year ago. Yet there’s a lot to make up for: From the second quarter of 2008 through the first quarter of 2010, during the economic swoon, 308,000 tech jobs were lost."

Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are recruiting students to try to hire them before they graduate, says former Google software engineer Gayle Laakmann McDowell. Some economists see the boom in tech hires as a good indication that the overall U.S. economy is on the rise, since technologies such as wireless, computing, and energy have a big impact on other sectors.

"A surge in tech hires in California could portend an upturn for the overall U.S. economy, says Jesse Harriott, chief knowledge officer at online job site Monster.com. That’s in part because what’s good for tech will touch related industries. Areas such as wireless, computing and energy have an effect on “a substantial part of the economy, such as logistics, inventory management, enterprise coordination, even hybrid autos, says Shane Greenstein, a management professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists foresee growth in wireless apps, online gaming and clean tech, he says. “It is not a classic tech boom, led by a big new opportunity like (Internet) browsing or Web 2.0, but a mixture of a few big and unrelated trends,” Greenstein says.

We've seen the increased interest in our students here in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department and it includes both undergraduates and graduates. The demand is up not just for science, engineering, mathematics and technology majors but also for majors in the liberal arts and other areas who have acquired a portfolio of math and technology skills.