Unemployment insurance claimants in the information and professional/scientific/technical services industries, which include a significant number of tech workers, have both surged 72 percent year-over-year as of May 2023 to their highest levels since 2016. While headlines about high-profiles tech layoff have died down, the number of UI claimants from tech sectors are still rising, perhaps due to the difficulty laid-off workers face in finding a new job rather than fresh rounds of new layoffs.
Additionally, the number of UI claimants in information & professional/scientific/technical services are both significantly above pre-pandemic levels in large part due to the surge in claimants over the last year. By contrast, industries like construction or manufacturing have seen large year-over-year increases but because of how low layoffs got in those sectors during the pandemic, claimant numbers there are still well below their May 2019 figures.
Conversation Starters are a periodic series of charts and data points from Glassdoor’s Economic Research team aimed at sparking conversations on timely trends in employee satisfaction, workplace community, the future of work, and the labor market more broadly.
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