The technology sector’s layoffs and the technology sector’s hiring boom are both true at the same time, and reading only one of those stories misleads any HR leader trying to plan next year’s workforce. New analysis from CompTIA, the technology training and certification body, shows that even as tech companies themselves keep shedding staff, demand for technology skills across the wider economy is accelerating. For people teams, this is not a contradiction to wait out. It is the shape workforce planning now has to take.
The split behind the headline layoffs
CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that tech occupation employment, which counts technology professionals working across every industry, not just tech companies, grew by 86,000 workers in August. Over the same month, tech companies themselves cut about 14,700 positions, spanning both technical and non-technical roles. CompTIA said the reduction likely reflects layoffs that several US-headquartered tech companies have disclosed in recent months.
Those two numbers moving in opposite directions are the story. The employer laying people off and the employer hiring for the same skill set are, increasingly, not the same company, and often not even in the same industry.
Demand is concentrating in AI-adjacent and core technology roles
Active job postings requiring AI-related skills passed 320,000 in August, a 4.5 percent increase from July, according to CompTIA’s analysis of Lightcast job posting data. That growth tracks with separate CompTIA research showing employers moving past AI experimentation into embedding AI in day-to-day operations, which creates demand for workers who can apply AI tools, manage AI-enabled workflows, and support AI-driven initiatives rather than simply build the underlying models.
The broader technology hiring market backs this up. Nearly 600,000 technology occupation postings were active in August, with 42 percent of them newly advertised rather than carried over from prior months. CompTIA pointed to growth concentrated in tech support, infrastructure, project management, and cybersecurity roles as evidence that employers are strengthening core technology functions at the same time they expand newer, AI-adjacent capabilities.
Where the demand is coming from
Professional, scientific and technical services, manufacturing, and administrative support services generated the highest volumes of new technology postings in August. Retail, wholesale trade, and educational services also posted month-over-month gains, which CompTIA read as evidence that the need for technology talent has spread well beyond the technology sector itself.
Why the demand is shifting from building AI to running it
A companion CompTIA study on corporate AI adoption, based on a June 2026 survey of 1,027 business and technology professionals and released in late August, helps explain what kind of technology hiring is actually growing. Fifty-nine percent of organizations now say their priority is integrating AI into their existing technology environment and business processes, a shift from the earlier phase of isolated pilots and proofs of concept toward embedding AI in how the business actually runs day to day. Ninety-three percent expect their technology departments to maintain or increase their involvement in AI adoption, particularly in security, support, training, and integration work, and 57 percent of organizations facing skills gaps say they plan to build internal training programs covering AI, data management, cybersecurity, and business processes rather than hire their way out of the gap entirely.
“Organizations are discovering that buying AI tools is the easy part. Creating an organization capable of deploying AI securely, responsibly and effectively is a much bigger challenge,” said Seth Robinson, vice president of research at CompTIA. “We’re entering a phase where the biggest barrier to AI success isn’t access to technology, it’s the ability to build the skills, processes and governance needed to operationalize it.”
That framing lines up with where the job postings are concentrating. Growth is not showing up primarily in roles that build new AI models from scratch. It is showing up in tech support, infrastructure, project management, and cybersecurity, the operational functions a company needs to run AI safely and reliably once it moves past a pilot. That is a hiring profile every industry can compete for, not one limited to companies with existing AI research teams, which helps explain why the demand is spreading into manufacturing, retail, and administrative services rather than staying concentrated in the technology sector itself.
What this means for the HR leader
The practical challenge this creates is a mismatch problem, not a headcount problem. An HR or talent acquisition leader who benchmarks hiring plans against tech-sector layoff headlines will systematically undercount the competition for the same technical skills coming from manufacturers, retailers, professional services firms, and public sector employers who have never called themselves technology companies. This is the same dynamic already visible in data center hiring, which cannot keep pace with AI infrastructure demand. Workforce plans built around the assumption that a slower tech sector means a slower market for technical and AI-adjacent talent will be wrong in the specific roles that are hardest to backfill: infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI-workflow management.
There is also a retention signal buried in the same data. If displaced tech-company employees are being absorbed into technology roles at employers outside the sector, as the aggregate employment growth suggests, then a company’s technology and AI-adjacent staff have more outside options today than the tech-sector layoff headlines imply, not fewer. That outside leverage compounds the pattern already documented in the widening wage premium for workers with AI skills. Compensation and internal mobility planning for those roles should not assume that layoffs elsewhere in tech are cooling the market for the people already on staff.
What to do with this now
HR and talent teams should treat tech-sector layoff volume and technology occupation demand as two separate inputs to workforce planning, not one. Track the CompTIA Tech Jobs Report and the underlying BLS occupational data alongside company-specific hiring plans, and stress-test retention strategy for infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI-operations roles against the reality that competition for those skills is coming from outside the tech industry as much as from within it.
Source: CompTIA
