With the coronavirus and unsteady financial markets driving uncertainty across industries and around the world, organizations' listings for and hiring of IT workers saw sharp decreases in February, The Wall Street Journal reports.
IT hiring seemed poised to make a comeback earlier this year; after consistent job cuts in the last four months of 2019, U.S. employers added 370,000 new IT employees in January and posted more than 50,000 new job listings in the sector that month, according to CompTIA estimates cited by WSJ.
In February, however, job postings reportedly fell by almost 70,000, and employers hired just 40,000 new IT workers.
CompTIA analysts suggested that the slowdown in tech hiring is likely due to organizations' having to deal with slowdowns in their own operations, including travel restrictions and workplace closures, as part of their efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Major tech companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon, for example, have closed stores, restricted travel and asked employees to work from home in light of the fast-spreading disease. As a result, many of these and other companies have revised their profit projections for 2020, expecting lower revenues due to the pared-down operations and global market.