08 Apr More Bad News: Layoff Rates for Technology Jobs Rising
New figures out from outplacement stalwart Challenger, Gray & Christmas show that technology layoff rates haven’t been this high since 2002. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the overall layoff numbers on a quarter-by-quarter basis (and in overall total) are not as close to the bubble-bursting era. Is that comforting? I wouldn’t begin to know how to answer that question, other than to say, I was a victim of the bubble bursting firsthand in 2001. This recession, by contrast, is much more widespread outside of technology, with a financial system backbone that is frail and weak.
Here is the lowdown (from the CG&C news release): First-quarter tech sector job cuts were nearly five times higher than the 17,345 cuts announced during the same period a year ago. Job cuts in the sector, which includes telecommunications, computer and electronics firms, have increased in each of the last five quarters, growing by an average of 42 percent every three months.
Despite the increase, quarterly technology job cuts remain well below the levels reached during the dot-com collapse that resulted in 1,163,742 tech-sector job cuts in 2001 and 2002. During that period, employers announced an average of 145,467 job cuts each quarter.
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