By Young tech workers, in high demand amid the shift to remote work, are itching to help businesses tackle cybersecurity breaches and network issues often related to the insecure networks and practices of telework. There’s just one caveat: An increasing number want to work at home themselves.
Between 2020 and 2021, searches for remote work among that demographic tripled from 3.5 percent to 10.5 percent, according to a report from job-search platform Indeed.
Workers new to the tech industry are in luck. A fundamental shift in how companies plan to operate post-pandemic favor remote/hybrid work arrangements. In fact, 33 percent of employers plan to keep U.S.-based employees remote after the pandemic, and tech jobs are the most likely to be fully remote, data from the consulting firm Pearl Meyer shows.
A surge in IT spending
At the same time, as more companies transition to a remote/hybrid work arrangement, the funding of information technology is forecast to surge. Global spending on IT is expected to rise 6.2 percent ($3.92 trillion) in 2021, according to a Gartner study.
This comes in response to a spike in cybercrime during the pandemic, as more workers performed their jobs from personal computers. According to a cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, there was a hundredfold rise in cyberattacks within the first three months of the pandemic.
This all puts young tech workers in the driver’s seat in the job market as companies race to mitigate cybersecurity issues and bolster networks for remote staff.
While remote-job postings have doubled since the pandemic and searches for remote jobs have surged to 10.5 percent in 2021 from 3.5 percent in 2020, this number jumped to 65 percent for those working in tech, according to a study by software firm Velocity Global.
To be sure, entry-level tech workers should be careful what they wish for, more experienced IT professionals say.
‘Higher rates of stress’
Tech workers’ sentiments in the second quarter of 2021 concerning remote working have evolved since the end of 2020, “with higher rates of stress being reported by workers and a significant decline in the number of workers who want to continue working remotely five days a week,” according Dice’s 2021 Technologist Sentiment Report.
About 36 percent of tech workers reported being burned out in the second quarter of 2021, a 32 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2020, the survey by the tech job-search site found.
That may explain why the study also found that the desire to be fully remote fell from 41 percent during the final quarter of 2020 to 29 percent in the second quarter of this year, Dice said, adding that more respondents preferred a hybrid work model.
Comments