Tech Hiring Up This Year

Hiring of technology professionals has been increasing since the first half of this year, with new IT hires accounting for about 10% of all the job growth in the U.S. in June, according to two independent assessments.

Total tech employment reached 4.47 million in June, an increase of 22,600 jobs from the prior month, or a .51% gain, according to TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group which tracks employment data month-to-month. The total excludes tech manufacturing employment.

Similarly, Foote Partners, which researches IT employment trends, reported a gain of 18,200 new tech jobs last month.

These gains are coming at the same time that some tech employers are cutting jobs.

IBM has cut more than 3,000 workers over the past few weeks, struggling Hewlett-Packard is still eliminating jobs, and Symantec is seeing layoffs as well.

The U.S. economy added 195,000 jobs overall in June, according to the Labor Dept.

Foote said that IT employment in the first half of this year is averaging 13,500 new jobs per month.

“While the pace of job creation in the national labor force appears stuck at 7.6% unemployment and new jobs are heavily in part-time positions and low wage full-time segments, IT jobs have been on a sustained growth upswing and wages are holding steady if not growing slightly,” said David Foote, chief analyst, in a statement.

Reports on IT employment figures from analyst can differ widely depending on what U.S. labor department categories are use in the calculations.

Another firm that analyzes the labor market, Janco Associates, reported a gain of 9,900 jobs in June based on the categories it tracks.

Despite the increase in hiring, IT salaries remain flat, said Janco.

“Based on our interviews with over 96 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff except to meet short term needs until they see a clear trend as to what is happening with the economy,” said Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis in a statement.

Janulaitis said that “67% of the CIOs we interviewed do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.”

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GM Adds IT Jobs

General Motors Co said on Monday it will add 1,500 jobs at a new software development center in Michigan as part of the U.S. automaker’s previously announced plan to move information technology work back into the company.

GM said it will hire the software developers, database experts, analysts and other IT positions over the next four years for the office in Warren, Michigan. It is the second of four software development centers GM plans to open, following one it announced last month in Austin, Texas.

In July, the Detroit automaker said it would reverse years of outsourcing IT work. GM now outsources about 90 percent of its IT services and provides the rest in-house, but it wants to flip those figures in the next three to five years.

The IT overhaul is spearheaded by GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott, who outlined the plan to GM’s 1,500 IT employees in June. The former Hewlett-Packard Co executive believes the moves will make GM more efficient and productive.

GM, which has not disclosed the cost or savings of its strategy, plans to cut the automaker’s sprawling list of IT applications by at least 40 percent and move to a more standardized platform. GM will also simplify the way it transmits data.

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IMs To Overtake Emails In Workplace

Many CIOs predict that real-time communication technologies, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, Chatter and Yammer will outpace traditional email in the workplace in the next five years.

That’s the conclusion of a Robert Half Technology survey of more than 1,400 CIOs at U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. The survey was published last month.

More than half (54%) of the CIOs polled said real-time workplace communication tools will surpass traditional email in popularity within five years. The prediction was a bit lukewarm, however: 13% of the respondents said real-time messages will be “much more popular” than email, while 41% said they’ll be “somewhat more popular.”

Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm, said a transition to real-time tools could yield workplace benefits, potentially making it easier to work as a team, solve problems, share ideas and manage documents.

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Defense Dept. IT Is ‘Stone Age’

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a stinging critique of the Defense Department’s IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement.

Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference in Washington,DC, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.

“Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.

Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.

The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.

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Google Employees May Get Xoom Tablets

Google employees may be getting new tablets, Motorola’s CEO said earlier in the week.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said it’s clear that his company’s focus on enterprise is paying off in that it is having conversations with companies wishing to buy tens of thousands of tablets. Motorola last week began offering its Xoom tablet, the first to run the Honeycomb version of Android, which was developed specifically for tablet devices.

When asked why those enterprises are choosing to go with an Android tablet rather than Apple’s iPad, Jha joked: “One of them is Google so I think I understand why that is.” Google may be more inclined to buy tablets running its own Android software rather than a device from competitor Apple. Read More…