Riding 10 consecutive months of improving numbers — and five months of year-over-year improvements — temporary job placement continues to outpace permanent employment growth, with professional IT staffing leading the way in temporary worker demand.

“Overwhelmingly, when I speak to professional-oriented staffing companies, the one vertical that they describe as the strongest, as experiencing the most recovery over the last four or five months, is the technology sector. The commentary we received is there is a shortage of highly qualified IT-related people out there that can service a lot of the projects that need to be done,” said Northcoast Research Holdings Analyst John Healy, who’s observed growing demand for IT professionals as companies begin to look into the technology updates they put off during the brunt of the recession.

“There is a little pent-up demand for IT spending, and I think companies are beginning to spend and they need people to come in and help manage and implement projects for them. And as business activity picks up for them, there is also a little bit more need for help desk operators, people to build security walls and firewalls for their business. So the IT demand that we’re seeing is very strong on the temp side,” he said.

Temporary staffing company Kforce (KFRC) is feeling the benefits of this pent-up demand, as are its competitors Manpower (MAN) and Adecco (ADEN), both of which recently purchased IT franchises.

“I think the IT business is growing faster than any end market and professional staffing, including finance and accounting, including legal, engineering, health care services,” Healy added. “And large global staffing companies are anticipating more pickup in demand for tech staffing, and they want to kind of bolster their portfolios.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 12:23 pm and is filed under General Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.