| January 2007 |
 |
| IT experts with financial backgrounds should find job hunting easy |
|
| Telecom project manager Peter J. Mucci is one of many Dice users who first found a contract position and later--in his case two years later--converted it into a full-time position. As a telecom expert, he naturally suggested that telecom holds great promise for IT workers in New York these days, and he mentioned finance as another prevalent industry. Anyone who heard about the outrageous bonuses that swept Wall Street last December knows that the wheelers and dealers are doing just fine. "The job market is definitely growing," said Mucci.
|
|
Adam Bilinski, branch manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies, agreed that finance, specifically investment banking, is hot right now. "C#.Net Developers with a background in investment banking and general application developers using C#, C++, or Java are in demand," he said. "We have an excess of technical support candidates, but a shortage of suitable mid-level application developers using C#, C++, or Java. We also need business analysts with a specific experience in Sarbanes-Oxley or any compliance for that matter."
"It was a good 2006," said Bilinski. "The economy is good, not great. The hiring seems calculated and specific versus the crazy explosive hiring of 1999 and 2000."
|
|
| "We have an excess of technical support candidates, but a shortage of suitable mid-level application developers using C#, C++, or Java" |
| - Adam Bilinski, branch manager of Sapphire Technologies |
|
The numbers would seem to back him up. Unemployment is down around 4%, and IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology, whose first-quarter IT Hiring Index was just released, found that 15% of New York area CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter.
The first quarter Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, which covers all industries, isn't quite as exciting, suggesting that from January to March, 16% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, but that level of hiring is way up from the same quarter last year.
At Dice, New York job listings started out strong in 2006 but tailed off in the fourth quarter, in part due to seasonality. "In the New York market, it's important to conduct a focused search," said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice. "Job seekers need to be able to articulate their skills clearly and look for perfect fits. It may take some patience." Salaries are trending up. The Dice Salary Survey found that the average IT salary in New York rose 4.74% over 2005 to $80,006, the third highest in the nation, albeit in a city with an extremely high cost of living.
IT workers in New York, who were especially hard hit by the dot com bust, should be heartened to hear that there are more U.S. IT jobs than there were six years ago, according to a recent study from the Association for Computing Machinery. The report lessened concern that tech jobs are moving abroad faster than they're being created here, a worry that hits especially close to home in the Big Apple, where thousands work in back office IT positions in financial industries.
Sapphire's Bilinksi had one final piece of interesting advice: look beyond Manhattan. "Jersey City, Hoboken, and the surrounding areas have become large hubs of business, especially in the finance sector. It's just too expensive to keep IT in Manhattan sometimes."
If you would like to be interviewed for the next Dice market report, or if you have comments about this article, please contact us at feedback@dice.com.
|
|
|
