The IT jobs most vulnerable to layoffs in 2025
Interest in artificial intelligence is spreading like wildfire, causing many IT workers to worry whether their job might soon be made redundant. The fear is understandable, as many businesses are replacing employees with automation tools, chatbots, and even coding AI.
Meanwhile, the tech and business media often carry scary headlines about large-scale layoffs, such as “The Tech Industry’s Workforce Crisis: 138,978 layoffs so far in 2025, projected to reach 243K by the end of the year.”
Such dramatic headlines can encourage a dismal perception of the IT workforce overall. Many experts say that while the technology industry is definitely taking a workforce hit, tech layoffs overall are stable this year. Some others say the picture is even improving.
“I think there is a lot of doom and gloom surrounding AI’s impact on roles across all sectors, but in particular within technology itself,” explains Matthew Baden, managing director, technical, at San Francisco-based recruiting firm The Search Experience. “But I would just say this, there are now more roles after the [explosion of the] Internet, they are just different. That will happen again with AI. Roles will be created that we don’t even comprehend yet.” Here’s a look at how tech employers are hiring, cutting, and adapting their workforces to this shift, and how employees can expand their own skillsets to improve job security.
A steady and selective IT job market
The IT job market looks steady, yet selective, entering the fall of 2025, says Brandon Dock, managing director at technical recruiting firm TGC Search in New York City. Employers certainly haven’t closed the door to IT hiring, but they have raised the bar for candidates.
The broader labor market is stable, so boards are optimizing rather than panic-cutting. The net result is a reallocation of talent instead of carpet-bombing headcount
“We’re still seeing roughly 440,000 active tech openings, with tech unemployment under three percent,” Dock explains. What stands out in the job market: There are fewer “nice to have” roles, and more “show me the ROI” jobs.
Companies are hiring for impact areas and trimming around the edges. Budgets and headcount are rotating toward AI, cloud, data, and security. Broad net-new hiring has cooled a bit, but demand for proven talent remains tight.
The impact of AI on job losses and job gains
There are two primary factors impacting the IT workforce this year, and both tie to AI.
First is the rate of AI adoption. Two years ago, OpenAI was the fastest company ever to achieve 100 million users. Now there are multiple AI products with millions more users.
Other forms of AI are not new in the workplace but their broader application and versatility is increasing. That has allowed more organizations to adopt them, in particular within traditional IT functions.
Second, as the AI footprint has increased, the support for the technology has exploded, both from a physical standpoint and from a technical one. That has offset the elimination of IT roles in some categories, according to Baden.
Leaders also learned that AI still needs people to integrate, govern, and secure it. Accordingly, most staff right-sizing happened in 2023 and 2024.
The broader labor market is stable, so boards are optimizing rather than panic-cutting. The net result is a reallocation of talent instead of carpet-bombing headcount, Dock explains.
All of this is not to say that IT pros shouldn’t keep track of workforce trends. Professional and technology services companies with large headcounts will likely be vulnerable to job cuts. Many Fortune 500 companies will also find efficiencies that could lead to layoffs. While the overall IT headcount numbers will probably remain stable, some job categories will be more susceptible than others to elimination.
The safest IT jobs are with non-technology organizations
Clearly, the safest IT jobs are with so-called “user” organizations – those that buy technology, but don’tt make or sell it. On the tech vendor side, it can be a very different story.
The team at RationalFX has aggregated layoff announcements sourced from U.S. WARN notices, the job portal TrueUp, TechCrunch and the Layoffs.fyi layoff tracker since the beginning of 2025 and identified the companies initiating the largest mass layoffs this year. The list of tech companies ranked by the number of laid-off employees is accessible in this public Google Sheet.
U.S.-based chip and hardware maker Intel tops the list of tech companies with the largest layoffs in 2025. The company is expected to trim its workforce by 20% by the end of the year, which would make the total number of layoffs there reach 33,900. Software giant Microsoft and Indian IT services provider TCS have also announced mass layoffs at a time when most tech companies continue to hire – AI professionals more than anything else.
U.S.-based companies are responsible for the majority of tech sector layoffs in 2025, with 105,953 positions lost or around 71% of the global total. Workforce reductions in Indian companies (15,594) account for another 10.5% of the total.
In the tech industry, the important point is that this isn’t a blanket tech downturn. We’re still seeing strong demand for security, cloud, data engineering, AI platform, and enterprise architecture roles. The real risk lies mainly in repetitive, lower-leverage IT work rather than AI, governance or revenue-tied jobs.
The most in-demand IT jobs have a clear connection to business functions
The most secure IT jobs are those that relate directly to critical business functions. The most in-demand skillsets are cybersecurity, cloud architecture and DevOps, data engineering, and applied AI. The global cyber talent gap is still measured in the millions.
“IT spend is growing in the mid to high single digits this year, with outsized investment in AI and data center infrastructure,” Dock explains. The most at-risk roles are narrow legacy maintenance and low-value tasks that modern tooling can absorb.
Cloud engineering and data center technicians are very safe roles at this moment in time. Baden agrees. “To put it in layman’s terms, AI puts huge pressure on the cloud. General internet and app usage is like going for a walk, versus AI which is like running a marathon. Cloud engineers are incredibly important for two main reasons: first to maintain the infrastructure that AI is built on. Second, to ensure it is built efficiently to keep AI cost down.”
How organizations typically make IT layoff decisions
It’s impossible to determine the full scale of AI-related layoffs, as most organizations would never admit to laying off employees in favor of automation and AI tools. In many cases, skilled, experienced and loyal employees are at risk of losing their jobs unless they manage to gain additional training and expertise that match the new market realities.
Before resorting to mass layoffs – which not only affect employees and the economy, but also cost millions to the company – businesses should look into upskilling the existing workforce, says Alan Cohen, an analyst at RationalFX.
To illustrate how layoff decisions are likely to occur at any organization, when asked what they do if asked to lay off 10% of an IT staff, Baden and Dock shared the following thoughts:
“If you have to lay off 10% of your IT workforce, sort by business criticality, redundancy, and adaptability,” Dock says. “Protect roles that touch revenue, customers, or compliance. Consolidate where tools or AI have made work duplicative. Prioritize people who have already moved into cloud, security, automation, or AI integration.”
Baden says he would try as hard as possible to avoid layoffs altogether, and seek an alternative that will save those employees in some other role temporarily.
“Unless you are confident you can rehire all of the people you need, retraining would be a much cheaper option over the medium term,” Dock says. “Skill sets are changing so quickly, and presumably you’re already-vetted and somewhat loyal employees would have a vested interest in adopting the newer technology. Focusing on people who want to go with the change, and those who didn’t, would be a good place to start.”
Steps IT pros can take to avoid being a layoff victim
There are steps that IT pros can take to make themselves less vulnerable to a layoff. First off, upskill yourself, Baden says.
“The beauty of today’s market is that, generally, the best education on newer technologies is available online, often for free,” Baden says. “Try newer technologies and consider which will be of benefit to your company. Then start researching and playing around with what might work. You generally work your way out of a job, and this is a good way to keep your job. And if you don’t, then you will have a step ahead of the others in the market who don’t try it out.”
Make your impact obvious, Dock advises. Tie your work to cost saved, risk reduced, or revenue enabled. Acquire or enhance skills in cloud computing, cybersecurity, data pipelines, MLOps, and AI governance. Be the person who can ship, secure, and scale with AI.
