RALEIGH – More than 31,000 high-tech job openings were posted across North Carolina in March, a huge 40 percent increase over the same month in 2018 and the highest figure reported to date in the report from the NC Technology Association.
Leading the way in seeking talent is the Charlotte metro area where more than 12,531 jobs were posted. That’s a 54 percent increase on March 2018.
Job demand remains strong in the Triangle, too:
- 9,502 open jobs in Raleigh, up 28.5 percent
- 4,654 open jobs in Durham-Chapel Hill, up 64.2 percent
Green Resources, a talent management firm that sponsors the NC Tech report, describes the competition for IT workers as a “war for talent.”
So far this year, open IT positions have climbed to 27,871 in January from just over 25,000 in December and 29,015 in February.
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North Carolina’s unemployment rate stood at 3.9 percent in March, according to U.S. Labor Department statistics.
However, openings did decline in three metro areas: Asheville, Fayetteville and Winston-Salem.
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“There were more open IT jobs in March than an any month in 2018 or thus far in 2019,” said Brooks Raiford, CEO of NC TECH, a business lobbying and trade association. “The increase over the same period a year ago outpaces the US rate of increase, a pattern we’ve seen for quite some time.”
IT job openings across the US climbed to more than 979,000, a 12.6 percent increase year-over-year.
Data sourcing
Data for the report, according to NC Tech, is compiled by “using Gartner’s CEB TalentNeuron, a leading supplier of real-time business intelligence solutions for the talent marketplace. Users of TalentNeuron include corporate human resources departments, employment services firms as well as the federal, state and local labor market analysts. The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine®Data Series (HWOL) is powered by the TalentNeuron database of real-time online job postings.”
