Are we starting to see a turnaround in the tech job market? After a couple of challenging years, we’re seeing some signs in the data that gives us reason to be hopeful. While it’s too soon to know for sure, these positive trends point toward more stability and opportunity for tech professionals. Let’s look at the data that has us feeling optimistic.

Nashville’s Tech Job Market Is a National Bright Spot

For those of us in Middle Tennessee, the good news is that we are in a city that continues to show remarkable strength in the tech sector. According to the 2025 State of the Tech Workforce report from CompTIA, Nashville is a standout market for tech hiring.

Top 10 for Job Growth: Nashville ranked among the top 10 metro areas in the entire country for net tech employment job gains in 2024, adding 802 new tech jobs. Tennessee was listed among the top 5 states in the US for net tech employment job gains with 3,634 new tech jobs. This trend is expected to continue. The Nashville metro area is projected to see a 4.2% growth in tech jobs in 2025 (vs. +2.8% in 2024), a rate that’s higher than the national average.

That all sounds good, but what about growth for the skills NSS graduates trained for? The projected growth rate in 2025 for those careers in Nashville is looking even better. For software developers, the projected growth is 6% this year. For data analysts and data scientists, it’s 5.3% this year. When you look at all of Tennessee the projected growth is even a bit higher for these jobs.

Nashville & Tennessee Outpace National Trends

Looking at the bigger picture, national trends also point toward a growing demand for software developers and data analysts. While overall hiring has been slow, the CompTIA report projects that net tech employment will grow by 2.5% in 2025. More specifically, the fields our graduates are entering show promising growth: Software Development roles are projected to grow by 3.8% nationally in 2025. Data Science and Data Analyst roles are projected to grow by 4.0% in 2025. So even if you’re not looking for a job in Middle Tennessee, there are opportunities.

Is Junior Hiring Showing Signs of Life?

This is all good news, but you may be asking, what about the slowdown in junior-level hiring that has been an issue both locally and nationally? We found an early sign that this may be starting to change, from a post on X by a reporter with the Financial Times. 

In his reporting on the hiring of recent college graduates, he points to a very recent turnaround in entry-level tech hiring for computer science graduates. While their training is different from what we teach at NSS, our graduates compete for the same entry-level jobs. The data in Burn-Murdoch’s reporting comes from the Current Population Survey which is sponsored jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 

What is NSS Tracking?

The CompTIA report references data from Lightcast for some of their analysis. We’ve been using that same data for about a year to track job posting trends even more specific to the skills our graduates have. We shared a few of these charts earlier this year. As a quick refresher, these charts reflect job posting for all skills levels. The blue line and left axis reflect national job postings and the red line and right axis reflect job postings in Middle Tennessee.

Going back to Q2 of 2024, Nashville employers have been steadily posting more positions for software developers (red line above). The same is true for data analysts and data scientists going back to Q4 2023/Q1 2024 (red line below). While nationally, job postings have been fairly flat this year (blue lines), the data indicates that Nashville employers are more optimistic about hiring this year than they were in 2023 and 2024. 

With all of these job postings, why are job searches, especially for juniors, still so long? The charts above only reflect the slow down in the number of jobs being posted. As job postings declined, companies were laying off thousands of tech employees. Even though the layoffs this year have been smaller, their effects continue to ripple through the industry. The availability of out of work senior and mid-level talent has meant that they are being hired into positions that require less experience in this crowded market. And while the data from the Financial Times on junior tech hiring is encouraging, we haven’t seen that in our local data just yet. But, as the backlog of more experienced but laid off talent goes away, hiring of entry-level talent typically starts to recover. 

So what does it all mean for your job search? The positive trends we see in the data are reasons to stay engaged and ready! This means keeping your skills sharp, practicing for interviews, and actively building your network. In today’s market, that last piece is the most important. A personal connection or referral can make all the difference. We’ll be posting the August meetup schedule next week. Pick out a few events and make a commitment to yourself to attend.