It’s no secret that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the City to become a major player in the technology industry. Tech jobs are booming in the Metropolitan area thanks to many factors, and a shift to cloud computing is fueling this growth. The research firm IDC released a report this month stating that the number of cloud-related jobs will jump to over 60,000 in NY this year. This increase will place NYC in the lead of cloud-related jobs, with Los Angeles coming in second.
The national unemployment levels are slowly dropping, but it’s in the Information Technology (IT) jobs that the lowest of these levels – a mere 2.7 percent as of last November – are found. The IT world is a good place to venture into if someone’s making a specific field-of-education decision; these positions are not only being filled, but facing potentially-critical shortages in the next few years. Smaller businesses are poised to reap greater challenges in relation to IT-worker hiring: they must compete with bigger names for top talent and safeguard against having those they already employ be lured away with more lucrative offers.
Americans may be unemployed in record numbers, but according to a recent Manpower Group study many employers are struggling to find qualified workers for vacant positions within their companies. It’s not that companies don’t want to hire; they need these skilled laborers desperately. But as more and more people stay unemployed for longer periods of time, they are unable to hone their skills, and specific technical knowledge is lacking amongst the general pool of job applicants.
Many American companies are getting by on smaller budgets than previous years. For an organization struggling to make payroll the burden of having to pay overtime wages can be crippling. The decision of whether or not to offer overtime, however, is not one that the company can make; in the U.S., overtime eligibility is governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Recently, the Computer Professionals Update (CPU) Act was brought to the Senate floor for discussion. In it, clarifications of which computer employees do and do not qualify for overtime pay are outlined.
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