2016 Forecasts and Predictions: More Hiring, Higher Wages, Longer Fill Times

Death and taxes may be the only certainties in life, though new year forecasts and predictions have to be close seconds. 2016 is no exception. Here’s a look at some of what we can expect in the months ahead:

Dice, the tech career site, says almost 8 in 10 hiring managers expect to do at least some hiring of IT professionals in the next several months; 27 percent plan to do “substantially more” hiring than they did in the last six months of 2015. No easy task, since half the managers in the survey report time to fill IT jobs is taking longer every day.
Looking ahead just three months, the Chicago staffing firm Brilliant says IT hiring will be more aggressive than the year before. More companies are reporting more open IT positions now than in the last quarter of 2015. The Brilliant forecast also predicts a modest increase in hiring for accounting and finance professionals.
CareerBuilder’s survey of 3,252 full-time employees found 21 percent of them have resolved to find a new job this year. That’s 5 percentage points higher than what last year’s survey found. Among millennials, 30 percent plan to be working elsewhere by the end of the year.
With middle-income households falling further and further behind, a third of all full-time workers have a second job and most of them have no intention of quitting them anytime soon. Indeed’s survey says more than half of the moonlighters work a second job just to keep up with the cost of living.
Good news for them may be coming soon. Moody’s Analytics figures that wages grew by an annualized 4 percent. That’s almost double the rate reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, What gives? Moody’s calculation is for full-time workers who have held their job a while. The BLS includes part-timers, new hires, and entry-level.
Not convinced? The Federal Reserve of Atlanta figures the 2015 wage growth for all workers to be about 3.1 percent. And it has been edging up since 2014. Even if you’re not that much into data, the Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker is very cool.
New York City’s largest staffing firm, Green Key Resources, expects wages for key positions to be “well above the 2 percent to 3 percent average” as unemployment in the metro area declines to well below the nation’s current 5 percent rate.
The minimum wage is going up all over. On January 1, 11 states raised their minimum wage (New York and West Virginia raised theirs on New Year’s Eve). In four states — Alaska, California, Massachusetts and Nebraska — it went up $1. The smallest increase? South Dakota, where it went up a nickel. Two more states will raise their rates later this year.