Daniel Slotta
Research expert covering Greater China
Employment in the IT industry - Statistics & Facts
In an era where digital transformation is no longer a luxury but a necessity, the spotlight is on IT professionals. As leading companies across industries push for further adoption of digital technologies, IT professionals have become some of the most in-demand members of today鈥檚 labor force. Especially with ever-increasing interest in artificial intelligence (AI), it comes as no surprise that AI and Machine learning specialists are expected to be the most challenging to recruit in 2025. Even the hiring process itself has now been mostly aided by AI tools according to tech recruiters globally.
Overall, the global tech industry is experiencing a shift in hiring dynamics, with in 2024 compared to the previous year. The share of developers worldwide who were considering changing jobs as more developers reported either being happy where they were or that they had recently changed jobs. This comes as the tech hiring market begins to settle following years of disruption and layoffs.
Despite recent challenges such as tech layoffs, the IT industry is showing promising signs of recovery, with demand for skilled professionals steadily increasing. As technology continues to evolve, the coming years are poised to offer abundant opportunities for IT talent.
IT skills the major driver in IT employment
Now more than ever, IT professionals must be aware of the fluctuating market demands regarding 聽IT skills. In 2025, recruiters were concentrating their efforts on hiring individuals聽highly knowledgeable in Java/JavaScript and Python, while they reported back-end and front-end developers as the most in-demand technical roles in the industry. Programming skills in languages such as聽Erlang and Elixir were associated with the highest IT salaries worldwide, with an average salary of around 100 thousand U.S. dollars.Overall, the global tech industry is experiencing a shift in hiring dynamics, with in 2024 compared to the previous year. The share of developers worldwide who were considering changing jobs as more developers reported either being happy where they were or that they had recently changed jobs. This comes as the tech hiring market begins to settle following years of disruption and layoffs.
Layoffs settling down as tech hiring recovers
In the face of economic uncertainty and technological disruptions, 2023 saw a significant surge in聽layoffs within the technology sector. By the end of 2023,聽tech companies had witnessed over a quarter million employees being let go聽across more than 1,180 companies globally. The United States, hit hardest, saw major corporations and startups struggle with inflation, rising interest rates, slowing growth, geopolitical issues, and supply chain problems. The tech retail industry was hit the hardest in 2023, while the hardware industry saw the highest number of layoffs in 2024. Nonetheless, tech industry hiring showed signs of recovery by the end of 2024, with layoffs reaching its lowest level since 2022.Highway to Silicon Valley
Employment in the IT sector in the United States has constantly been increasing over the past decade. Despite a severe decline in the IT workforce in 2020, the U.S. IT employment has since gradually increasing in recent years, reaching just shy of three million employees by the end of 2024. Northern California is the global center of high-tech and innovation, with some of the world鈥檚 largest companies having their headquarters there, such as Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, Netflix, OpenAI, Nvidia, and X (formerly Twitter). Therefore, it is hardly surprising that聽IT professionals earn the highest salaries in Silicon Valley. When it came to roles, jobs in聽IT management were paid the most in 2024, with salaries valued at around 168 thousand U.S. dollars, while software developers and project managers ranked among the highest-paid roles in the industry.Despite recent challenges such as tech layoffs, the IT industry is showing promising signs of recovery, with demand for skilled professionals steadily increasing. As technology continues to evolve, the coming years are poised to offer abundant opportunities for IT talent.
