New York City’s IT Job Losses Seen Bottoming Out

Nationwide, people continue to lose jobs. But for New York City’s IT sector, the job market appears to have bottomed out.

That’s the conclusion of the Pace/SkillProof IT Index Report for the first quarter, which Pace University released last week.

The index, which looks at the number of IT job openings in New York relative to a 2005 baseline, fell 4.5 percent during the first quarter. Compared with the 50 percent plunge in the index in the fourth quarter of 2008, a 4.5 percent dip is cause for optimism.

“The worst of the layoffs is over,” said Henning Seip, president of SkillProof Inc., the technology company that compiles the underlying data for the index. “The situation has started to stabilize.”

The index tracks 11 standardized IT sector job categories. Among those, the smallest drop in demand was for IT managers, and the largest was for software engineers. But the report found that the drop in demand for both categories was declining.

“There’s a better feeling among employers,” said Farrokh Hormozi, a Pace University economics professor who contributes analysis to the report.

Hormozi believes the downturn has stabilized enough for some employers to be concerned about having too few employees. He also thinks outsourcing may be losing favor as a money-saving measure, as the cost of doing business rises in India and declines in the U.S.

“Naturally, New York City is more expensive than anywhere else,” he says. “But the trend is that companies feel it’s a lot more reasonable to ‘insource’ rather than outsource.”

Filed by Matthew Flamm of Crain’s New York Business, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.