Who says all the tech jobs are being shipped off to India?

While the offshoring of American jobs has generated considerable concern in recent years, the truth is, back in the states the IT industry is making a steady comeback.

Recent numbers underscore the good news – salaries and opportunities are looking downright robust.

Consider these positive trends:

• More people than ever are employed in information technology, according to an analysis by InformationWeek magazine. The publication calculated that 3,472,000 IT workers were employed through the end of the first quarter – about 17,000 more than the fourth quarter of 2005.

• Tech job board Dice.com reports the tech job market "continues to thrive" as postings on Dice through April rose 31 percent over the past year to 89,286 openings.

• Tech-sector job cuts announced in the first quarter were 40 percent lower than the same quarter a year ago. It was the fourth consecutive quarter in which tech cuts were below the previous year’s level, according to a tech-sector report by outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

• Industry trade group AeA reports that high-tech companies in the US added 61,000 more jobs than they cut last year – the first such growth since 2000.

• California maintains its title as tech employment capital of the US. California continues to offer more jobs (904,920) and better pay (averaging $90,554 annually) than any other state, according to AeA.

Not everything, however, is coming up roses for the sector.

Mergers Hurt

Mergers and acquisitions, particularly in the telecom industry, have been a driving factor behind tech-sector job cuts for several quarters, and the first quarter of 2006 was no exception. Nearly half (43 percent) of the job cuts this year in all sectors resulted from mergers, and 88 percent of those merger cuts occurred in telecommunications.

Still, the IT sector has become strong enough to weather such setbacks. "Despite the inevitable job-cutting that typically follows mergers, the job market picture for the nation’s tech workers is definitely improving," notes CEO John Challenger. "Many jobseekers in high-demand fields such as storage systems administration and information security are probably finding themselves in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiating employment terms."

AeA also found that high-tech growth was fairly widespread, including overall electronics manufacturing, which had been particularly hard hit in the dot.com implosion. Software and services, such as systems design, showed growth, while chip making was up slightly. Computer and peripheral manufacturing slipped somewhat.

Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York top the list of highest-paying metro areas for tech professionals, according to Dice, which reported salaries in Silicon Valley averaged $85,600, topping all other regions. The most sought-after skills, based on job postings, include C and C++. Requests for workers with .Net experience grew.

Talent Shortage Returns

The recovery of technology jobs has led to evidence of a looming labor shortage. Tech workers may soon find themselves in territory not seen since the peak of the dot.com era: prized objects of bidding wars among desperate, labor-deprived employers.

In a quarterly survey by the tech industry trade publication CIO Magazine, 26.3 percent of chief information officers said IT labor was hard to find and keep – double the 13 percent of CIOs who said the same thing a year ago.

Demand for workers is likely to remain high, as 45 percent of CIOs said they plan to increase spending over the next year.

"Some businesses may in fact regret some of the job cuts they made in recent years, which, in retrospect, may have been too deep." Challenger adds. "Recent surveys suggest that employers are having an increasingly difficult time finding (IT) workers."

California Attracts Billions

Will the technical employment comeback continue? Judging by the big boost in venture capital funding in 2005, California can expect further solid job growth, according to AeA. Investors poured $10.4 billion into California firms in 2005, up from $10 billion in 2004 and $8.3 billion in 2003.

Compare that to $2.4 billion invested in Massachusetts firms last year. Matthew Kaznierczak, AeA vice president of research, says such funding shows fundamental investor confidence in California tech firms and employees.

"The venture capitalists recognize quality workers and are attracted to locations with access to those workers," he explains.

Business Skills Sought

While the numbers are encouraging for high-tech workers, a survey of members of the Society for Information Management found employers also want applicants with entrepreneurial and business skills.

Based on interviews with 96 SIM members, all of them IT managers at firms ranging from small companies to multinational enterprises, the study found that business skills accounted for five of the ten attributes organizations want from staffers in the next three years.

"While some jobs, especially technical ones at larger organizations, continue to be outsourced, the IT jobs most likely to be retained and created in-house will emphasize business and management skills such as business process re-engineering or project planning, rather than purely technical skills," according to the report.

The other five most-requested skills include a mix of project management and technical abilities. "It’s now more important than ever to have business skills" that help ensure your position is less likely to be outsourced, advises Kate Kaiser, associate professor of IT at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

The report also echoes other rosy forecasts, predicting the overall IT workforce is expected to remain stable at least through 2008.

Different specialties offer particular promise. IBM, for example, is conducting a zNextGen campaign to recruit 20,000 new mainframe workers by the year 2010 to replace retiring baby boomers.

Even then, some business acumen will be welcome. "Taking a healthy sampling of management and business courses while obtaining a management in IT is often enough," Kaiser counsels.