The US IT jobs market hasn’t exactly been robust thus far in 2025, and downward revisions to May and June’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data mean IT jobs lost in July are part of an even deeper sector slowdown than previously believed.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported relatively flat job growth last month, but unimpressive payroll growth numbers hid an even deeper reason to be worried: Most of the job growth reported (across all employment sectors) in May and June was incorrect.
According to the BLS, May needed to be revised down by 125,000 jobs to just 19,000 added jobs; June had to be revised down by even more, with 133,000 erroneous new jobs added to company payrolls that month. That meant just 14,000 new jobs were added in June.
“Adjustments at those levels of magnitude are not acceptable from any organization,” IT management consulting firm Janco said of the May and June modifications. Janco blamed the modifications on “poor data capture, poor infrastructure, incompetence, or political gerrymandering,” but regardless of the cause, it means that the IT job market is looking decidedly less healthy than it did a month ago.
“According to the latest revised data by the BLS, the IT Job Market shrank by 26,500 YTD,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said of the latest data. “That is after adjusting the May data down by 4,300, June data down by 7,800 jobs, and reporting that 10,300 jobs were lost in July.”
For those keeping count, that’s 20,300 more than the 6,200-job shortfall at the same point in 2024, and we’re now in what tends to be the worst half of the year for layoffs.
The current year to date IT jobs market losses compared to 2024 – Click to enlarge
US President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer shortly after the publication of the report, alleging BLS had rigged the data to make him look weak.
Uncertainty hurts
Janco, which for a long time has relied exclusively on BLS data for its monthly jobs report that focuses on IT employment, said that it plans to diversify its data sources because of the massive revisions.
Against that backdrop, Janco reports that BLS data peg the IT-sector unemployment rate at 5.5 percent in July – well above the national rate of 4.2 percent. Meanwhile, the broader tech occupation unemployment rate was just 2.9 percent, as reported by CompTIA.
Janulaitis blamed economic uncertainty for continuing to drag down IT hiring – a sentiment CompTIA agreed on, though the firm noted that there were still some bright spots of demand.
CompTIA stated that, while staffing reductions were made in IT, custom software services, cloud infrastructure and telecom, other roles such as developers and software engineers, system architects, support specialists, and cybersecurity mavens are among those in demand. Janco said that unfilled IT-specific roles tend to be related to AI, LLMs, Blockchain, and OmniCommerce technologies.
For all that uncertainty, CompTIA noted that it did find some solid evidence of job growth in the AI space, though not for AI-exclusive roles, which haven’t grown over the past two months. Instead, CompTIA said that roles with AI competency are where it’s at.
“CompTIA’s AI Hiring Index indicates relatively higher growth in hiring demand for the broad range of positions where employers require some type of AI skill to perform effectively in the job role,” the certification firm said.
In other words, amid economic instability and AI inflation, landing a good IT job is tougher than ever unless you know how to engineer a good prompt. ®
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