It’s a harsh reality that the tech sector is now on the same track as many of the financial and retailer firms. The number of job cuts will be tremendous in the electronics, telecom and computer industries. Experts are estimating that the number of cuts will be numbers they haven’t seen in years.
According to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a global outplacement firm that tracks daily job cut announcements in those industries, the technology sector is on track to lose 180,000 jobs by the end of the year. (PDF) In 2003, tech firms announced more than 228,000 job cuts. (Chart to left is year-by-year job cut announcements in the tech sector.)
This year, the industries have collectively announced more than 140,000 job cuts through October 31, a 31 percent increase over the 107,000 announced in all of 2007. In the third quarter of 2008, the industries said they would eliminate more than 82,000 job, outpacing the almost 51,000 announced during the first half of 2008.
Since the beginning of the fourth quarter, almost 20,000 more job cuts have been announced, not including the estimated 5,000-6,000 announced by Sun Microsystems this morning.
I do think technology sector will bounce back very fast despite the fact that the number of employment increase every year.
I see a lot of jobs that used to be called IT that now sit in HR, finance, marketing and other groups. IT has just gotten easier.
Richard you make a good point. IT is a broad term that can be whatever a company wants it to be.