The worldwide spend on enterprise application software is expected to total $120.4 billion in 2012, a 4.5 percent increase from the $115.2 billion spent in 2011.
Industry Trends
A survey of 1,500 Elance customers found that 73 percent plan to hire more online contractors than in 2011. Within the next five years, 54 percent of respondents’ workforces will be online. Elance’s online, cloud-based hiring method gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.
This is a guest post by Mike Cleland. Mike is president of Charted Path, a management consulting firm to the staffing industry. He blogs about strategy and business management for staffing. You can reach Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter.
It is projected that over 58 percent of companies plan to use temp employees over the next few years. Temp work will no longer be limited to administrative assistants. High-level professionals are increasingly choosing to work as temp employees.
Last week, President Obama announced a $26 million multi-agency program to encourage innovation and job creation through public-private partnerships. The Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge will help to build entrepreneurship across the country.
According to recent SEC filings, growth at entrepreneurial companies is skyrocketing at a rate of 13+ percent over job growth rates last year. This is compared to growth rates of a mere 3 percent at non-entrepreneurial companies.
A recent survey by Bank of America shows that small-business owners expect local and national economic conditions to improve. Nearly 31 percent plan to increase their workforce by an average of 25 percent.
SMBs are spending more on technology across the board, from hardware and devices, to cloud services and virtualization. IT budgets at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees grew 6 percent in the first half of 2012 over the second half of 2011.
Hiring for executive positions is looking to be on the rise over the next six months according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder and HeadHunter.com.
The college graduating class of 2012 is heading into a better job market than alumni of the previous three years, according to a new study from CareerBuilder and CareerRookie.com.