CompTIA's September jobs report reveals some grim statistics for IT pros: 142,000 jobs were lost last month. Tech sector growth slowed as well, but positions were still created rather than lost.
By Brandon Vigliarolo | October 11, 2016, 9:14 AM PST
It's not the best time to be an IT professional. Budgets are getting tight, cloud computing is making jobs more difficult, and now CompTIA reports that September was bleeding IT jobs at an alarming rate.
The CompTIA IT Employment Tracker for October reveals some interesting ups and downs. Before we dive in let's talk specifics: The report uses IT sector employment and IT occupation employment as two distinct terms.
IT occupation employment is clear: CompTIA uses this term to refer to anyone doing actual IT work. Programmers, CXOs, help desk techs, and network engineers are all in IT occupation employment.
The IT sector, on the other hand, is everyone involved in the tech world. Only 44 percent of IT sector jobs are IT occupations: The rest are marketing, finance, HR, and other positions.
The IT sector is growing according to CompTIA. IT occupations, on the other hand, are not.
Where the losses are
IT occupations across all industries faced a serious drop in September, with 142,000 jobs disappearing. That wipes away half of the job gains from August, when 205,000 IT occupation jobs were added.
The one upside to the news is the year-to-date numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is where CompTIA pulled data for the report. Job losses have been numerous but there's still been an overall gain of 17,000 positions since January.
CompTIA's report isn't specific about the particular jobs that were lost in
