(I am assuming, throughout this post, that you are already working and want to find a better job. If you are not currently working, please go here and scroll through my other posts. Many of them were written for first-time job seekers or people who are currently out of work.)

One thing that might make 2012 a good year to find a better job is that many companies are starting to rethink outsourcing to China. If a sizable number of jobs are brought back to America, this will obviously help manufacturing workers. It will create more need for IT people, too, since modern factories and warehouses are heavily automated and need an ever-growing number of techies to run.

Meanwhile, there is this question: Does Government Create Uncertainty and Prolong the Recession? I am not paid to look into a crystal ball and utter incomprehensible predictions about our financial futures, and how government policies affect it, so I won’t make any. All I will say is that we have an election in November, 2012, which may or may not give us a new president and a bunch new faces in Congress, and if that isn’t uncertainty I don’t know what is.

In the end, looking at macroeconomics isn’t going to be of much use in making your employment decisions. You personal situation matters much more. What if you are offered a job that pays 20% more than the job you have now, but to take it you’ll need to move? And walk away from your underwater mortgage? This is a calculation that is not going to be affected by the upcoming election. Neither Ron Paul, Barack Obama or anyone else is going to immediately stabilize our housing market. You need to weigh the risk of moving against how much you think you will like the new job and whether you will get enough of a raise from it to be worth the financial disruption it will cause in your life.

And how about this alternative: you find a high-paying job in New York or another high-cost area, but keep your house in Cheapville and leave your family there, while sharing a New York apartment with six other guys and going home once or twice a month? Migrant laborers from Mexico and many other countries have been doing this for decades. It’s hard on a family, but if it’s the only way to have a healthy financial situation, it might be what you decide you need to do — at least until you find a better job near your home or manage to work a short sale or other way to get out from under your mortgage and bring your family to where your new job is.

Suddenly, being (or staying) single looks easy, doesn’t it?

There is no free lunch, and no decision that doesn’t have a downside to it. You might decide to stick with your current job, at least for the next year (assuming the company looks stable enough that you probably won’t lose that job in 2012).

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

It’s a good thing it’s January, and that it’s a slow-hiring time of year, because that gives us an entire month to make up our minds. And we may need the whole month, given the many uncertainties of life in modern America.

• U.S. employment numbers released Friday by the Department of Labor‘s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revealed a net gain of 13,700 IT services sector jobs in August, representing the fifteenth consecutive month of positive job growth in these job segments in
  federal employment data

That is better than almost any other set of job categories the federal government tracks, besides nursing home aides and other bottom-of-the-food-chain health care workers who don’t get living wages.

Foote goes on to point out:

• 6,000 new jobs were added in the Management and Technical Consulting Services and another 7,700 jobs in the Computer Systems Design and Related Services employment segments in August—2,200 more than in July—for a total of 122,700 added in these segments over the past twelve months (70,800 in last six months).

There’s a down side, too:

• Meanwhile 47,300 jobs were lost in the two other IT-related jobs segments, Telecommunications and Data Processing, Hosting and Related Services, an aberration caused by a labor strike in the telecommunications industry that removed 45,000 workers from company payrolls during the August survey reference period. This is in contrast to an average monthly loss of 2,483 jobs in these segments in the prior six months (2,708 monthly losses over prior twelve months).

So the Verizon strike is screwing things up, but even without it the sectors mentioned above have been bleeding jobs — except that they really haven’t been.

Specifically, David Foote says:

• At this point I don‘t think anyone should be surprised that skills acquisition, not recruiting full time people, has been the bigger focus in the past few years for employers managing IT resources. Much of this acquisition has been accomplished by farming work out to consultants and contractors, to part time employees, offshore vendors, and to managed services and cloud computing suppliers. As a result the revenue growth numbers in the services industries have been strong and the forecasts for continued expansion equally robust.

So more work is going offshore, as has been the case for a number of years, now, a trend likely to continue until our government smartens up and levies hefty tariffs on all imports, including services and intellectual property.

But there is also more work being done by consultants and contractors, one or the other of which you may want to become. Or, if your corporate IT job is looking a little insecure but you don’t want to go off on your own, you may want to look for work with managed services or cloud computing providers. Things seem to be looking up for them.

In any case, while our economy is certainly in a shambles, IT people are less shambley than almost anyone else. It’s a time to count blessings and either hunker down in the jobs we have or, if those jobs are likely to go away, start our own businesses or very smart, highly-targeted job searches.