| July 2006 |
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| Dice job postings in Atlanta are up 9% since Dec. |
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After showing signs of becoming a player in the nation’s tech sector earlier this year, Atlanta’s IT job market is still hot midway though the summer and many are predicating and even better fall.
Steady economic growth, combined with a solid housing market, have helped the city remain one the country’s brightest destinations for IT workers once again last quarter.
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“Atlanta is one of those regions that everyone is watching closely to get a pulse on the big picture of IT hiring,” said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice, the leading technology career site. “For the past several quarters there has been increased demand for IT employment and many of the hiring companies and recruiting agencies who use Dice have noticed a tightening labor market.”
Although listings on Dice.com jumped an impressive 18% in the Atlanta metro area during the first quarter of this year, from 2,232 in December to 2,643 in March, new postings recently took an 8 percent dip.
Despite that drop, many analysts and observers remain bullish on the Atlanta IT job market.
“I’ve never seen the demand for employees to the extreme that it is now,” said Larry Bruce, vice president of Sapphire Technologies, an IT staffing firm with a regional office in Atlanta. “There are a lot of small, strong companies. It’s a great place to be.”
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| "As the employment market becomes more competitive, technology executives are now also focusing efforts on sound retention strategies" |
| - Brian Gabrielson, Robert Half Technology |
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A solid state economy -- Georgia’s unemployment rate stands below the national average at 4.3% -- and an affordable home market has kept Atlanta one of the hottest spots in the nation.
Kiplinger's Personal Finance recently ranked the city fourth on its annual "50 Smart Places to Live" list. The ranking is based on cities that combine affordability and livability -- "places that are vibrant and fun, and where a dollar still goes a long way."
And businesses are noticing the pinch the thriving job market has placed on their staffing needs.
For the second consecutive quarter, like many other metro regions in the United States, the problem is no longer a scarcity of jobs in Atlanta but rather a shortage of qualified candidates available to fill growing staffing needs.
“It’s not quite where it was during the dot-com boom but it’s pretty close,” said Brian Gabrielson, national practice director with Robert Half Technology.
Gabrielson says that the tightening IT job market has already led to hiring changes, as well as salaries being upward.
“As the employment market becomes more competitive, technology executives are now also focusing efforts on sound retention strategies,” he said.
While the relative ‘brain drain’ has put an emphasis on landing quality employees and then making sure they stick around, it has also sent salaries soaring, according to several national indicators.
As previously reported by Dice, the Dice survey found that the annual average salary for IT professionals in the Atlanta area was $75,000 in 2005, almost $10,000 more than their colleagues in the Southeast, which includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.
And it’s no longer just the certified IT worker commanding the big bucks, according to Foote Partners, an IT compensation and workforce management research firm.
“It’s an accelerating trend, the fact that IT skills without certification are growing in value 70% greater than certified skills over the past year,” said David Foote, president and chief research officer for Foote Partners. “While technical skills are still important, employers are not placing the same premium on certification of these skills they once did.”
The most sought-after IT skills right now, according to Dice, include Java, SAP and Oracle. And once Human Resources identify candidates in that range, says Sapphire’s VP Bruce, they better move.
“If you’re still taking nine weeks to fill a position you’re going to miss out,” Gabrielson said.
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| "I've never seen the demand for employees to the extreme that it is now" |
| - Larry Bruce, VP of Sapphire Technologies, Atlanta office |
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