| April 2007 |
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| Job seekers would love to find better opportunities closer to home |
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| 2007 got off to a slow start in the Inland Empire. Although this is one of America's fastest growing regions, prospects for IT job hunters seem to have leveled off in recent months. Dan Cordero, regional manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies, says demand in San Bernardino is pretty weak right now. "We're seeing more need in Riverside County. Both of these locations are huge bedroom communities where tons of people live, but most commute to Orange County, Los Angeles or San Diego counties for work," he says. "Therefore we aren't currently seeing huge demand in San Bernardino itself although we are seeing a decent amount of activity in surrounding areas."
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The Southern California commuting culture is a constant and burning issue for both San Bernardino and Riverside counties as they try to attract both technology employers and a tech-savvy workforce. At a workforce and economic development conference held in Riverside at the end of March, local employers and economic experts agreed that other than logistics and distribution, which have always provided the lion's share of IT jobs in the region, biotech, alternative energy, and aerospace could get a better footing, and provide technology jobs that would keep workers closer to home, if incentives were offered. Development opportunities in around the San Bernardino International Airport, for example, could prove attractive to aerospace and defense-related firms.
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| "IT job hunters should focus on new media, telecom, financial services, local government, medical devices and healthcare" |
| - Dan Cordero, regional manager Sapphire Technologies |
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At present, Cordero says, the industries and skills where he sees the most activity remain the same as he has reported in the past. He says IT job hunters should focus on new media, telecom, financial services, local government, medical devices and healthcare. The job skills most in demand: .NET developers, infrastructure experts, SQL server database developers and DBAs, QA, telecom engineers, project managers, systems administrators, business analysts, Unix administrators, SAP, Java developers, security experts, Oracle developers and DBAs.
Will things pick up? San Bernardino employers expect to hire at a respectable pace during the second quarter, according to the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, which cuts across all industries. From April to June, 30% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, according to Manpower spokesperson Evlyn Wilcox. Still, things have been better in the recent past. “San Bernardino employers expect less favorable hiring conditions than in the first quarter when 40% of the companies interviewed intended to add staff,” says Wilcox.
The current Dice numbers don’t indicate quite that much activity. First quarter job listings were actually down 6% after a respectable fourth quarter surge. Salary trends, however, are positive. Though Dice's annual Salary Survey doesn't break out the Inland Empire as distinct from other nearby regions, average IT salaries in LA and San Diego both rose dramatically in 2006 (7.67% and 10.05% respectively), so it's a good climate throughout Southern California, salarywise. The question, of course, is how much of those salaries tech workers are spending on gas to make their long commutes.
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