Looking for a safe IT job? SMEs could be the answer

With the recession causing thousands of redundancies in the IT industry, it seems SMEs could prove a safe port in the economic storm for tech workers.

Small and medium-sized businesses are far less likely to cut the number of IT staff they employ this year, according to new research.

Some 29 per cent of SMEs in the US and Europe said they will decrease their headcount this year, while 61 per cent of larger enterprises are planning to do so - with 31 per cent of big businesses preparing to cut more than five per cent of their IT staff, research by analysts Forrester has found.

Photo credit: Chris Isherwood via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons licence

A roughly similar proportion of SMEs and large enterprises are expecting to take on extra staff this year - eight per cent and nine per cent respectively.

While SMEs may be less likely to axe staff this year, it seems they're finding greater stress put on their overall IT budget.

According to Forrester, European SMEs are more likely to cut their tech spending than their large enterprise cousins - 32 per cent of SMEs are reducing their IT operating budget this year with 28 per cent also lowering IT capital budget, compared to 27 per cent in both cases for larger businesses.

Among those businesses lowering their IT spending, SMEs are taking the knife much deeper, expecting their operating budgets to fall by four per cent year on year in 2009 and their capital budgets by two per cent. For larger firms, the falls are expected to be two per cent and one per cent.

"We should note that these are planned budgets; due to the deeper recessions in Europe than in the US, we expect that actual IT spending levels will be reduced more in Europe than in the US, and both regions will come in below planned budgets," Forrester notes.