| April 2007 |
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| Job listings are up but are not back to peak 2006 levels |
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| Spring may have sprung, but it's still a little chilly in Philadelphia. "The local Philadelphia IT job market started off 2007 a little slow out of the gate," says Joseph Santora, area manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies. "The combination of very low unemployment rates and the insistence of companies to find the 'perfect' resource have been contributing factors. March has showed signs of a rebound however, with a significant increase in placements over the first two months of the year."
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Job hunters in Philly will do best, Santora says, if they can serve as project managers, software developers, or network engineers, the three positions he finds most commonly in demand. "This year we have also seen an increase in quality assurance roles at all levels and disciplines. Most of the tester requirements we are receiving require expertise in one of the tools from the Mercury Suite," he adds.
Those assertions are borne out by thin-client developer Neoware. Located in suburban King of Prussia, it was identified by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in the Philadelphia area. Its current job listings include positions for senior software engineers and senior product managers.
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| 23% of Philadelphia CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter |
| - Robert Half Technology's second-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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At Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Philadelphia's largest tech employer (with over 4,500 workers), available positions include process engineers, disaster recovery specialists, and senior field service technicians. Interestingly, healthcare is also the business of the fastest-growing Philadelphia-area tech company of the past five years. Deloitte & Touche's Technology Fast 50 names I-trax Health Management Solutions of Chadds Ford tops for the region, with an astonishing 18,800% revenue increase between 2001 and 2006.
And Neoware and Siemens aren't the only high-tech firms that are hiring. IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology, whose second-quarter IT Hiring Index was just released, finds that a strong 23% of Philadelphia CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter, the second highest in the nation.
At Dice, the first quarter made up somewhat for a terrible fourth quarter in 2006. Job listings are up 12%, but there should be more. Typically there are about 3,500 listings at any given time, but right now the list is just short of 3,000.
As for salaries, Philadelphia is holding on, if not exactly thriving in the current climate. In the 2006 Dice Salary Survey, the average IT salary in Philadelphia was found to be $72,786. That's up 1.26% from 2005 but slightly short of the national average of $73,308. Philly does, however, have a lower cost of living than nearby New York.
Sapphire's Santora has one other thought for motivated IT job seekers. "Windows Vista will absolutely create a spike in IT employment over the next couple of years. We have seen very little in the way of activity yet, but we are hearing about several companies that will be moving to this platform down the road. Depending on what OS companies are moving from, there could be a great amount of work to be done. Anyone who can get their hands in Vista right now should do it!" Robert Half Technology agrees. In a recent survey it conducted, some 77% of CIOs ranked Windows administration as the skill set most in demand at their IT sites. So even as the IT industry looks beyond Windows toward the open-source world, it's not quite ready to say goodbye to that good old legacy OS just yet.
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