For more than a year now, we’ve all been looking for good news. Any good news.
Lately, good news has finally been coming along.
The best news may have been the Centers for Disease Control recently saying what we’ve all been anxious to hear: people who’ve been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus are now free to socialize indoors without masks, at least in small groups.
As so many have said, that’s the light at the end of the tunnel that we’ve all been looking for. For the really social people in our industry, the isolation has felt like a crushing weight. Now they’ll have at least some release from total isolation.
That’s not the only good news, though.
During the TechServe Alliance “State of the Industry” webinar in February, TechServe CEO Mark Roberts noted that IT unemployment was 2.9%, about half the overall rate of 6.2%. IT employment, he said, was on a six-month upward trend after the sector was devastated at the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns.
“We’ve recovered about three-fourths of the jobs we lost, and we anticipate that within three months or so, we will be back to even,” Mark predicted. “If we maintain the current growth trajectory of the last six months, we will be back to where we were pre-pandemic.”
If Mark’s prediction comes true, that will be great news for the IT workers who did lose their jobs but haven’t gotten them back or found engagements elsewhere.
Also during that webinar, Jim Janesky, Senior Advisor with Peapack Private Investment Banking, noted that The Conference Board’s forecast of GDP growth for 2021 is 4.4%. That’s optimistic considering the past year, but there’s even more optimism out there.
Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist, has made headlines by forecasting the US economy will grow at a rate of 7.7% this year. Seven point seven.
But that’s not all. He’s also predicting that the overall unemployment rate, 6.2 % as we write this, will drop to 4.1% by the end of the year.
That level of optimism fits with the blog post our Senior Vice President, Chris Walters, wrote in January, in which he said: “I believe that 2021 will be a year of amazing recovery and growth. We have vaccines becoming available to the public and many companies have created new ways to pursue their business goals.”
We continue to be optimistic. And we continue to work everyday to help our clients and customers work through the recovery. Let’s hope we get there soon!