After several years of voracious hiring, tech jobs are no longer the most secure place for today's white-collar workers: Some of the biggest employers have slashed head counts this year.
Companies like Google and Amazon spent 2021 and early 2022 hoarding talent from each other, and are now kicking workers off payrolls by the thousands. So which parts of the economy are benefitting from all the talent shuffling around in a trade which consultancy firms estimate is still short of workers?
Using data from Revelio Labs, Stacker ranked the 25 industries where the highest shares of laid-off tech workers have landed their next roles. The analysis covers departures from many of the biggest players—formerly collectively known as FAANG—that saw layoffs in the last half of 2022, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Salesforce, as well as about 20 others.
Revelio draws on online public employment records data, identifying worker separations related to significant layoff events affecting 200 employees, or 30% of a company workforce, over a 30-day period. It also includes separations at companies that had mass layoff events.
The unemployment rate in the information sector—which includes most tech industries, in addition to others—increased from 2.3% in March 2022 to 3.1% in March 2023, with a total of 84,000 unemployed people nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology was in high demand. It helped workers clock in and earn paychecks from the safety of home as well as keep in touch with family and friends. Many tech leaders say they mistakenly thought those trends would be stickier than they have actually been, as higher interest rates have driven consumer credit debt up—and consumer spending on goods down. At the same time, tech workers, ironically, were not overwhelmingly happy with their jobs, surveys suggest. Some reports from idle employees suggest tech firms may have had a difficult time integrating new hires.
There were 58,000 information sector layoffs in February 2023, over five times higher than a year prior, according to preliminary estimates from BLS. The layoff rate in the information sector increased from 0.4% in February 2022 to 1.9% in February 2023. This is a much steeper increase than the layoff rate for all industries, which remains at 1%.
Artificial intelligence products rolled out at the beginning of this year are also forecast to improve knowledge workers' productivity, and could factor into any head count reductions made over the next several months. The race to build the dominant AI product suite could propel the growth of new companies, but there's also been an increased willingness among Americans to start their own businesses since 2020.
About 45% of laid-off tech workers left the tech industry, and nearly half wound up in a significantly different role than the one they were laid off from, according to data from Revelio.
