IT Management Slideshow:
IT Jobs: Is Employee Confidence Declining?

You may be anticipating the need to ramp-up your IT employee recruitment and retention efforts in light of an expected and sustained economic recovery. After all, when prospects for tech jobs improve, employees naturally want to check out their worth on the free market. The Great Recession has kept many workers from pursuing new opportunities in part because the opportunities simply weren't there. That said, all economic turnarounds have their ups and downs, and a recent survey from Technisource indicates that confidence levels among technology professionals are experiencing a bit of a setback. For example, fewer tech professionals polled in Q1 2011 said they felt optimistic that the economy is improving compared with Q4 2010. Significantly more respondents in Q1 2011 said they expected to lose their jobs within the year, compared with those who had the same expectation in Q4 2010. On the optimistic side, these workers do feel that there are more tech job opportunities available than there were in 2010. So don’t entirely ditch those recruitment and retention plans. "Employers really need to evaluate how committed their top talent is to their organization, and if they are equipping them with some of the things they value to keep them around,” says Michael Winwood, president of Technisource. “Talent will be a key differentiator as the economy recovers, as companies continue with plans for new technology implementations, software migrations and other long-overdue projects throughout the year." The report also sheds light on workplace differences among generations and genders on these topics. Some 205 IT professionals responded to the survey.