The IT Labor Market Amid the Pandemic: The Case of the United States

In this article, we investigate how the COVID-19 epidemic affects the U.S. information technology (IT) labor market and, accordingly, how organizations choose to hire IT employees in the current situation. Using the second half of 2020 (July–December) dataset of 57 847 IT job postings from a large online employment website, we perform descriptive analysis and logistic regression to examine the relationships between pandemic severity and work arrangements (remote versus on-site), work schedules (part-time versus full time), and organizational sectors (commercial versus government versus nonprofit). Our results reveal that the U.S. IT market in the latter half of 2020 is in turbulence, for both part-time and remote job postings. For governments and nonprofit organizations such as hospitals and schools, “frontline” IT support professionals were highly prized, whereas commercial employers, including tech giants, were more interested in growing a remote IT workforce.