Category: Employment

42% of office workers graded their work space design a C. Another 10% rated their cubicle or office a D, and 4% gave it an F. Only 6% gave their space an A. Logitech this week released the results of the study, which surveyed 1,003 U.S. office workers. Those surveyed spent an average of 37.5 hours a week in their workspace, whether in an office, cubicle or shared space, according to the study. In all, office workers gave their respective spaces a 2.3 grade point average, the equivalent of a C+, Logitech said.

Computer-software engineering is the single fastest growing occupational field and is projected to be so through 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. In the latest data the government has compiled, the median annual salary for a software engineer working in the applications realm is US$67,670, with the highest-paid 10% with that job title pulling in more than $106,680. Those doing development work on the systems software side earn slightly more.

Candidates prepared with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering earn just a bit more when entering the job market fresh out of college than their computer-science-degreed counterparts — $53,924 and $52,723 respectively. A master’s degree adds about another $5,000 to starting salaries. On the computer-hardware side, engineers earn an average of $67,300. A job-seeker just out of a bachelor’s program can expect to garner about $53,924. A Ph.D. ups the ante considerably to $70,140.

Robert Half Technology surveyed more than 1,400 CIOs of U.S. companies with 100 or more employees, and asked them about their employment plans for this year. 11% plan to add full-time staff to their IT departments in Q2, while 2% anticipate personnel reductions. 87% of CIOs have no hiring or firing plans. 9% of CIOs planning a hiring increase compares with a net 3% last quarter and is the largest since Q3 2002.

Average hourly rates rose 2% to GBP 45/hour in the second half of 2003 – down from a peak of GBP 75 four years ago.

The total number of people unemployment fell by 13,400 from the previous month to 892,100, the first time it has slipped below the 900,000 level since September 1975, the National Statistics office said. The fall was greater than analysts’ expectations of a decline of 5,000, and was the largest since June 2001. January’s unemployment rate, meanwhile, dipped to 2.9% – the lowest rate since June 1975 – from 3.0% in December.

The job market may not be booming. But for many in the college class of 2004, it won’t be quite as dismal as it was for last year’s grads.

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.6% in January to the lowest level in more than two years as companies added just 112,000 new jobs – fewer than expected but enough to keep alive hope for a turnaround in the struggling job market. The jobless rate fell 0.1% last month to the lowest level since October 2001, when it was 5.4%, the Labor Department said Friday. January’s rate matched the 5.6% posted in January 2002. Employers added new jobs last month at a pace not seen in three years. The last time payrolls expanded more than 112,000 was in December 2000, when companies added 124,000 positions.

After seeing average paychecks shrink in 2002, salaries for IT professionals inched up in 2003, according to a new report by Dice Inc., which surveyed 21,000 visitors to its online job recruitment site from January to December 2003. The average IT salary in 2003 reached $69,400, up about 2% from $67,900 in 2002. This boost is a reversal compared with the previous year, when Dice’s survey reported that average pay for IT pros fell in 2002 by about $500, to $67,900, from $68,400 in 2001. Looking ahead, Dice president and CEO Scot Melland says 72% of Dice’s employer clients plan to increase hiring during the first six months of this year. That’s almost a complete reversal from the 70% in 2002 who said they’d be hiring less in 2003.

Non-farm business productivity, or worker output per hour, increased at a 2.7% annual rate in Q4 2003 after an upwardly revised 9.5% pace in the previous quarter, the Labor Department said. The advance was the slowest since a 1.5% gain in the final quarter of 2002 and was lower than the 3.0% clip expected by analysts.

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October. India’s economy is expected to grow by nearly 8% this fiscal year – an acceleration likely to be sustained in coming years, the finance minister said Tuesday.

San Francisco and the adjacent world-famous high-tech hub of Silicon Valley will add about 17,000 new jobs to local payrolls this year, followed by 33,000 new jobs in 2005, according to a forecast issued by the Association of Bay Area Governments. The region lost 62,000 jobs last year and shed 268,000 between the end of 2000 and the end of last year.

The latest statistics from CWJobs’ Quarterly IT Skills Index found that permanent IT vacancies rose by an average of 4% between October and December 2003, while IT contract jobs increased by just 1%.

Health care costs were mentioned by 19% in the poll, up from 11% a year ago and 5% two years ago. Unemployment was mentioned by 14%, up slightly from 9% a year ago.

Silicon Valley lost jobs from Q2 of 2002 through Q2 of 2003 at only half the rate – 5% – of the year-earlier period.

Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable. Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26% of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.

62% of information technology workers surveyed expect raises of between 1% and 5% next year, according to a report published Thursday by Brainbench, which provides skills measurement online. Almost half of the respondents (42%) said that they had received a salary increase of between 1% and 5% this year. Another 43% said they had not been given a raise in 2003. However, just 11% of the IT professionals surveyed do not expect to receive more money in 2004, according to the report.

The Commerce Department report notes that the number of U.S. workers in IT occupations totaled 5.9 million in 2003, down 8% from 2000. Salaries for workers in IT-producing industries declined 1.3% from 2001 to 2002, while the average annual wage for all private workers increased 1% that same year.

The US unemployment rate fell to 5.9% last month – the lowest rate for eight months – from 6% in October. The US economy added a lower than expected 57,000 new jobs during November, official figures have shown.

Productivity – the amount an employee produces for each hour worked – rose at a 9.4% annual rate in the Q3, the Labor Department said. That rate was stronger than the 8.1% gain initially estimated a month ago for the July-September period. And it is up from a 7% growth rate posted in the second quarter of the year. Most private analysts had expected the productivity figures would be revised higher: the consensus among economists was a gain of 9.2%. But no one expects those sorts of gains to continue.

Cyberstates 2003, an annual study by the American Electronics Association, showed that employment in the U.S. high-tech industry dropped 8% last year, to 6 million, from 6.5 million in 2001. In 2003, the loss is likely to be 234,000, or a 4% decline, Santa Clara, California-based association said. Electronics manufacturing saw the biggest fall in 2002, accounting for more than half of all technology jobs lost. The software industry saw a loss of 150,000 jobs, the first loss in the seven years that AEA has been publishing its Cyberstates report, it said. The only areas with good news to report was in research and development and testing laboratories, where employment increased by 7,000 jobs in 2002, AEA said.

California, while leading the country in high-tech jobs with 995,00 workers at the end of 2002, also lost the greatest number of jobs, with 123,000 people put out of work. Texas, in second place with 479,000 jobs, had lost 61,000 in the year. The District of Columbia saw a small rise of 2,200, while Wyoming gained 500 and Montana added 100 jobs. U.S. high-tech exports fell 12% to $166 billion in 2002. These represented 24 percent of all U.S. exports that year, the AEA said.

The five economists agreed with the government’s forecast for 1.5% economic growth next year. They said the figure could rise to 1.7% if Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder succeeds in passing a Jan. 1 income tax cut worth euro15.5 billion ($17.8 billion) ? a move currently stalled in the opposition-controlled upper house of parliament. The panel predicted that Germany’s jobless rate, which has weighed heavily on Schroeder’s popularity, will remain above 10% in 2004.

India now has more than 160,000 call-center workers and expects to have a million by 2008.

Software workers with two years of experience are paid about 25,000 rupees ($545) a month, roughly one sixth of what their U.S. counterparts earn but a princely wage in a country with an average per capita income of $480 a year. Multinational company salaries are 50 to 60 percent higher at the entry-level and 30 percent higher at the middle management level when compared with Indian IT services companies

CRN Magazine has this lengthy annual research on the value of certifications in the small and large businesses. Here’s a snapshot of the most valuable certifications in terms of Return On Investment.

Small businesses:
Check Point CCSA
Microsoft MCSA
Cisco CCNA
Citrix OCA
Novell CNE

Large businesses:
Microsoft MCSD
Microsoft MCDBA
Check Point CCSA
Check Point CCSE
RedHat RHCE

The Russian IT market has been growing by more than 10% a year over the last four years, according to Russoft, the national software developers association. International recruitment agency Kelly Services released a study this summer showing that with robust demand, salaries for many Russian IT professionals have risen by more than 50% in the last year.