New York Post Online Edition: "March 27, 2004 --

Wall Street employment will rise by 2.5 percent to 3 percent, base salaries will increase 10.8 percent and bonuses will rise 27.2 percent this year, the Securities Industry Association told city budget planners.

If the group's report, , 'The Street, the City and The State,' released yesterday, turns out to be right, a lot more money will be pouring into the coffers of New York City's government.

'The industry and the city are both recovering, and we should start to see job growth at some point,' said SIA chief economist Frank Fernandez, who delivered the estimates to city officials working on the city's 2005 budget. "

The Best News You Haven't Heard

For those of you who visit this site, for some time I have been writing about the uptick in consulting utilization because when job recoveries start to occur, that is usually the first step. Firms are wary of increasing employee roles so they opt for consultants at low rates. This has been occuring since August, 2003.

The next phase is when we start to hear about managerial positions and project office jobs being asked for. This is a sign of improvement because you don't start a project office and hire project managers unless you're doing something new and new has been a word missing from everyone's vocabulary for several years.

We are finally seeing an uptick in these positions, too. Usually this means that technology hiring will increase sharply.

Jeff Altman

From The Whington Post:

In New York City, fewer find they can make it . . . a closer look at this largest of U.S. cities reveals much that's not so hot. New York's unemployment rate jumped in January from 8.0 to 8.4 percent, the worst performance among the nation's top 20 cities. It has lost 230,000 jobs in the last three years. Demand for emergency food has risen 46 percent over the past three years, and 900,000 New Yorkers receive food stamps. Inflation, foreclosures, evictions and personal bankruptcies are rising sharply. Fifty percent of the city's black males no longer are employed."

In the third quarter of 2003, the nation's gross domestic product grew at a rate of 8.4 percent; the comparable rate in New York grew by 0.3 percent.

I don't care what the government statistics are reporting. I didn't believe them when the economy was tanking and more people were losing their jobs than what was being reported. I certainly don;t believe them now when we see very strong evidence that hiring is picking up.

The government statistics record hiring at large corporations. It does not record consultant utilization. If you haven't noticed, most large firms haven't hired a lot of PC support people or help desk people for years, preferring instead to contract for consultants who do the job for them. These jobs have been poutsourced to US consulting firms for years.

Programming and project management are now being outsourced to and not just to India. Local firms are contracting wit consulting firms for project managers and technical staff in numbers taht we have not seen in several years. Salaries are begining to inch upwards as the economy starts to improve and firms sstart to hire more.

When I spoke to a trade group in October of last year, I told them that I believed the end was near for the jobless recovery. That the goal is to geta consulting assignment or in any way return to a job that would allow them to continue to have a good resume (don't take a job that has you doing installation of networks at doctors' offices if what you've done up until that point is very different).

Come to networking groups like Your Next Job (www.newyorkmetrotechnologyjobs.com/yournextjob.htm) and network with others. Get into some of the social networking groups like Ryze or LinkedIn.

AZ fewwyears ago, I was extremely pessimistic about the job market. Those days are over. You can do it if you work the system as hard as you worked when you were working at your job.

Jobs growth remains weak
U.S. employers added just 21,000 positions in Feb.

New York City lost 16000 positions, the lowest annual job loss in three years.