Even if companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have laid off thousands of employees, tech positions are still in high demand in 2023, according to research from Indeed.
Big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are laying off a lot of people, but a new ranking says that job prospects in the tech industry as a whole will be among the best of any industry in 2023.
Indeed, which makes an annual list of the best jobs for job seekers, says that eight of the top 10 “best jobs” in the U.S. this year are in technology.
According to Indeed’s rankings, the top tech jobs are full-stack developers, data engineers, cloud engineers, senior product managers, back-end developers, site reliability engineers, machine learning engineers, and product designers (No. 10).
The only two non-tech jobs in the top 10 were psychiatric nurses (No. 4) and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners (No. 9).
44% of the top 25 jobs were in technology.
Scott Dobroski, an expert on career trends at Indeed, said that the possibilities in tech go beyond the traditional tech giants and include retail, finance, professional services, travel and tourism, and more. All of these fields need technologists to build their online presence and businesses, he said.
“Companies all over the world are very interested in tech skills,” Dobroski said. “Because every business in the world today is a tech business.”
The ranking on Indeed is based on “opportunity” for job seekers, which means that the jobs had to be growing quickly. For example, out of a million job listings on Indeed, there were 1,398 open positions for full-stack developers. This was the most common job type. A full-stack developer builds both the front and back ends of a website.
All of the jobs on the list pay more each year than the average salary in the United States. Indeed, they said that at least 10% of the jobs they post offer remote or hybrid work, which is becoming an increasingly important factor for American workers.
At a time when traditional tech giants have been cutting a lot of jobs, it may seem strange that broad technology jobs will be popular in 2023.
Google said on Friday that it plans to let go of 12,000 employees, which is the most people the company has ever fired in its 25-year history. Last week, Microsoft said it would let go of 10,000 workers by March 31. Amazon said earlier this month that it would be cutting more than 18,000 jobs, which would be its biggest job cut ever. Meta said in November that more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its staff, would be cut.
In some cases, layoffs are the result of hiring too many people too quickly at the start of the COVID pandemic. They are not always a sign that the economy is going to get worse. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, both mentioned this overextension when they talked about why they were letting people go.
Officials at the company are also getting ready for a possible downturn in the U.S. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates because it hopes that making it more expensive for consumers and businesses to borrow money will slow demand in the economy as a whole and stop high inflation.
Economists said that labour market signs don’t show that a recession is coming soon and that it’s a good time to get a job in general.
Even though things have slowed down a bit in recent months, the number of job openings (a measure of how much employers want workers) and the number of workers who quit on their own (a measure of how confident they are that they can find a new job) are both close to historic highs. Still, wage growth is strong, especially for people who switch jobs, and the unemployment rate is close to its lowest level in the last 50 years.
In November, Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, wrote that tech skills are “in high demand across the economy.” Pollak said that employers often say they don’t have enough software engineers, cybersecurity experts, data analysts, and web designers. These include government agencies, aerospace companies, health systems, and retailers.
“Had tech companies kept growing at the breakneck pace of 2020-2021, they would have monopolised U.S. tech talent and made it impossible for employers in non-tech industries to hire tech talent,” she said. “Now, maybe other businesses have a chance.”
In addition to being good news for people who already work in tech, Indeed said that a high demand for technical skills is also a “big sign” of where there are opportunities for people who want to start a new career or switch to a different one.
Dobroski said that in the current hot job market, employers are willing to look for people with the right skills in “nontraditional ways.”
For example, he said, workers can often learn some basic tech skills through software engineering boot camps, online courses, or certificate programmes that last a few weeks or a few months.
Dobroski said that workers who are already employed, especially those at large companies, may be able to use mentorship and new learning programmes at work to learn new skills or go down different career paths.
Dobroski also said that workers should think about how their current skills could be used in another field. Some of the top 25 best jobs in 2023 were in human resources, and he said that skills from sales and marketing backgrounds could be useful in those jobs.
