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As ground zero of the country's financial crisis, New York's IT job market is likely to be tight in the coming months as hundreds – if not thousands – of financial-industry tech professionals lose their jobs. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli expects up to 40,000 jobs overall in the financial sector will be knocked out over the next year. In August, the state's unemployment rate rose to 5.6 percent. So far, that remains below the national average of 6.1 percent.
Except for a blip in July, the number of New York jobs on Dice has steadily declined during 2008, from around 10,000 in January to fewer than 9,500 in September.
Recruiters in New York are painting a sober picture of the IT job market, which isn't surprising when you consider the financial industry accounts for some 20 percent of global IT spending. Tim Valdner, a senior recruiter at Analytics Recruiting in New York, says he noticed the market started to slow during the fourth quarter of 2007. That's when it became evident which of his clients were heavily invested or tied to the sub-prime mortgage market. Today, he's seeing some hiring in IT among hedge fund or asset management firms, but there hasn't been much activity among the former investment banks that survived the meltdown. That area in particular represented a lot of IT jobs in order to support the fast-and-furious daily trading infrastructure.
"I don't know when we’ll come back to aggressive hiring," says Valdner. "Maybe, we will see it in three or four months, when all this fleshes out."
Adam Bilinski, branch manager for recruiter Sapphire Technologies in New York, says the full-time market is slowing. Most large banks don't anticipate hiring many full-time employees in the fourth quarter. The IT workers who will be hired will be consultants, and many of those will have that "option-to-perm" in case conditions change in 2009.
"I expect this to be a tough fourth quarter for some companies and staffing levels to remain steady at best," Bilinski says.
As for the types of IT skills and jobs that remain in demand, Bilinski says support roles that include system administrators and security administrators have been consistent. The application development world still is dominated by .Net and Java expertise, and senior C++ developers are always in demand.
"While we've heard talk of the need for project managers and business analysts that specialize in transition and merger work, we have yet to see the demand but expect to in 2009," says Bilinski. "As far as business lines, equities is your best bet. Fixed Income has really taken a hit with the mortgage crisis so there is an abundance of developers with a fixed income background in the market now."
The expectation that the remaining top-tier banks will scoop up some of the talent recently put on the streets hasn’t been realized yet. Christa Baker, an area manager at Manpower Professional, says her firm deals with the banks that survived the meltdown and those are being cautious. A lot of potential jobs are being put in a holding pattern at the moment, which seems to be “more fear-based than anything else,” she says.
Specifically, Baker has noted a slowdown in the telecommunications space. “Everything has been tenuous over the past couple of weeks,” she says. “But what we probably will see is organizations put a lot of full-time positions on hold. And in some, we will see more movement toward consultancy.”
Despite Market Woes, Dice Had Nearly 9,500 Tech Jobs in New York |
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