Report: IT wage trends indicate changing field

The end of 2010 saw an increase in wages for IT workers, as well as rising wages, according to a recent Computerworld report. This trend was accompanied by a shift in the nature of IT jobs, which may be a result of increasingly cloud-based enterprise IT infrastructures.

According to the report, approximately 3,500 workers joined the IT workforce in December, bringing the national total to 3.9 million. Tech employment in the U.S. was at its peak in 2008, when the total number of workers was 4 million.

David Foote, an IT workforce research analyst, told Computerworld data about IT employment may be more difficult to measure than some imagine, because of the changing face of the industry. As companies increasingly adopt managed cloud services and other cloud-based technologies, IT jobs are changing dramatically.

According to Foote, many "hybrid IT/business professionals" are often not included in IT employment statistics.

During the same period, the U.S. economy added approximately 103,000 jobs altogether, leading to a reduction of unemployment from 9.8 to 9.4 percent, according to the Labor Department.