The IT talent shortage, and where the growth actually is
"IT is a growing field" is true and also not specific enough to plan a career around. Underneath that one sentence is a mix of roles growing fast, roles growing slowly, and a few roles that are actually shrinking. Knowing which is which matters more than the headline number.
The industry-level picture
CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce 2026 report estimates the U.S. tech workforce at nearly 9.8 million people, with net tech employment projected to grow 1.9% in 2026 alone, adding roughly 185,000 jobs. The median salary across all tech occupation categories was an estimated $112,805, more than double the median wage across the entire U.S. labor force. Longer term, CompTIA's projections, built on BLS and Lightcast data, put tech workforce growth at roughly twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce over the next decade.
The role-level picture is uneven
That aggregate hides real variation. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook breaks 2024 to 2034 growth projections out by specific occupation, and the spread is wide:
| Occupation | Projected growth, 2024 to 2034 |
|---|---|
| Computer and information research scientists | +20% |
| Computer and information systems managers | +15% |
| Computer systems analysts | +9% |
| Computer support specialists | -3% |
| Computer programmers | -6% |
Two of those five are shrinking. That is not a rounding error, and it lines up with a pattern showing up across the whole labor market, not just IT: the roles built around a narrow, well-defined, repeatable task set are the ones most exposed to automation and offshoring, while roles built around analysis, architecture, oversight, and judgment calls are the ones still growing.
What this means for choosing a track
This is the practical case for looking at labor data before committing months of study to a specific direction, rather than picking based on what sounds impressive. A systems analyst role, a security operations role, or a cloud architecture role sits in a different part of this growth curve than a narrowly scoped support or scripting role, even though all of them get lumped under "IT" in casual conversation.
It is also the reasoning behind how we choose which certification tracks and Job Ready courses to build here: not by guessing what sounds interesting, but by checking real demand signals, government growth projections, job posting volume, and vendor exam data, before writing a single lesson. The goal is to point study time at the part of the field that is actually expanding.
Sources
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