The technology job market has seen its share of doom and gloom in recent years, but a Deloitte survey released this week provides a ray of light to downtrodden tech workers.
Deloitte’s FAST 500 survey, an annual poll of more than 150 Canadian and U.S. CEOs of companies on Deloitte’s FAST 500 list, found 95 per cent of the firms planned to boost their headcounts this year.
The FAST 500 is an annual ranking of the fastest growing technology companies in North America, based on percentage revenue growth over the last five years.Future hiring will take place in two main areas – technology and sales.Text The results of this year’s survey weren’t all that surprising, says Garry Foster, national director of Deloitte Canada’s technology practice.
“In early 2000, companies were cutting back employees to try to get back to profitability,” he explains. “Companies are in the stage now where they’re profitable and they’re trying to grow internally.”
Future hiring will take place in two main areas – technology and sales, Foster says.
“In Canada we’re seeing more demand for sales and marketing people as opposed to technology developers,” he notes. The reason for this, Foster believes, is that Canadian companies have to worry about reaching the entire North American market and not just their own country.
“You generally aren’t going to develop products just for the Canadian marketplace, so there’s a real sales and marketing drive we’re seeing in Canada.”
The survey also found that FAST 500 CEOs were much more optimistic about the economy and their prospects this year than they were last year. Thirty-six per cent of CEOs were extremely confident about their companies’ future growth in this year’s survey, compared to 21 per cent last year. And only two per cent cited the economy as a concern, a steep drop from 16 per cent in the 2004 survey.
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