Business

Employment in IT sector sinks by almost 6,000 as restructurings continue

The CSO report utilises real-time Revenue data to detect trends in the labour market

Hybrid working: programmer writing program code with two monitors

Employment in the information and communication sector fell by 4.6% or 5,900 in the 12 months to January

Eoin Burke-Kennedy
Tue Mar 19 2024 - 12:40

The State’s technology sector suffered the biggest annual decline in employment in January, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

The agency’s monthly estimates of payroll employees, which utilises real-time Revenue data to detect trends in the labour market, indicated that employment in the information and communication sector, which includes global names such as Google, Meta and Stripe, fell by 4.6 per cent or 5,900 in the 12 months to January.

The sector globally has seen a series of lay-offs and restructurings in recent months, with companies saying they expanded too quickly during the pandemic. TikTok is the latest big-name player to announce a global restructuring. A number of positions at the video-sharing platform in Ireland are understood to be in the firing line.

The latest CSO payrolls data were in the main positive.

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The figures show seasonally adjusted employment in the Republic as a whole rose by 1.8 per cent to 2.41 million year-on-year in January, a period that corresponded with a gradual weakening in the global economy and a slowdown in Irish exports.

Payrolls data counts people who have “worked for greater than zero pay during the reference month”. In the 12 months to January the transportation and storage sector saw the largest rise in the number of employees (+5.9 per cent, or 6,600).

The latest figures show all but three of the 15 sectors in the Irish economy experienced an annual increase in employment in January.

The largest monthly fall was in the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector (-1.7 per cent), while the largest monthly rise was seen in the education sector, which showed an increase of 0.6 per cent.

The 20-24 years age group saw the largest increase (+1.1 per cent) in employment in the month to January, while five age groups observed monthly employment growth, one showed no change while two showed decreases.

The CSO’s latest Labour Force Survey indicated the number of people aged 15-89 in employment increased by 89,600 or 3.4 per cent to a record 2.7 million last year.

“While remaining relatively tight, an easing of vacancy rates and slowing employment growth point to a labour market adjusting to cruising speed from being at full tilt,” the Central Bank said in its recently quarterly bulletin.

Eoin Burke-Kennedy

Eoin Burke-Kennedy

Eoin Burke-Kennedy is Economics Correspondent of The Irish Times

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