ITs still a bad scene in the US job mkt

For years the technology sector has been considered the most dynamic,promising and globally envied industry in the United States. It escaped the recession relatively unscathed,and profits this year have been soaring.

For years the technology sector has been considered the most dynamic,promising and globally envied industry in the United States. It escaped the recession relatively unscathed,and profits this year have been soaring. But as the nation struggles to put people back to work,even high-tech companies have been slow to hire,a sign of just how difficult it will be to address persistently high joblessness. While the labor report released last week showing August figures provided mildly positive news on private-sector hiring,the unemployment rate was 9.6%.

The disappointing hiring trend raises questions about whether the tech industry can help power a recovery and sustain American job growth in the next decade and beyond. Its tentativeness has prompted economists to ask If high tech isnt hiring,who will?

We are talking about people with very particular,advanced skills out there who are at this point just not needed anymore, says Bart van Ark,chief economist at the Conference Board,a business and economic research organisation. Even in this sector,there is tremendous insecurity. Government labor reports released this year,including the most recent one,present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.

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Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally,computer scientists,systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6% in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing,it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms,and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. Thats a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers,whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off,given the dynamism of the industry.

Im sending out lots and lots and lots of applications,to everywhere within a 50-mile radius, says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann,49,a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis,Ore,and sent the work to China.

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Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area,including Hewlett-Packard,the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. I apply for everything I can find,but there are just not that many jobs out there, she said.

Nevertheless,many high-tech firms large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the US.

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