While tech jobs were prosperous last year, an incoming economic downturn could stave off continued growth.
According to CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent report, the U.S. added 136,000 new tech jobs in 2021, a 2.5% increase. The top market for this growth included the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
However, the report also shows that layoffs are coming to the industry as companies attempt to doomsday prep for a potential recession and climbing inflation. In fact, the first half of 2022 saw 4% more layoffs compared to the previous year. Still, these layoffs impacted subsectors differently.
Fintech experienced a staggering 500% increase in layoffs due to cryptocurrency stocks plummeting. But the sectors that experienced the highest concentration of layoffs were within administrative and sales teams.
Despite the grim outlook for the tech industry’s future, Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center in San Francisco, believes that jobs could still grow in the future, but the pace will be slower than anticipated.