CRA Bulletin

A recent Government Accountability Office report contains a variety of interesting information, including the table, below. It shows the differences between 2001 and May 2005 in the number of computer specialists employed in the U.S. and their salaries. It uses nine of the occupations listed under the “Computer specialists” category (15-1000) in Bureau of Labor Statistics tables.

Two points stand out:

The variation of fortunes among the different occupations: the number of computer programmers and database administrators fell between 2001 and 2005, compared to large increases in other occupations, particularly network systems and data communications analysts.

Even though five of the nine computer specialist occupations experienced slower wage growth compared to all U.S. occupations between 2001 and 2005, all of the computer specialists were paid more– often far more– than the average wage paid to all U.S. workers.

These issues are echoed in the BLS projections for job growth among computer specialists.

The report, U.S. Semiconductor and Software Industries Increasingly Produce in China and India, is available as a 1.5 MB PDF at http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-423