Margret Johnston

The number of IT industry jobs in the United States grew to 5.3 million in 2000, an increase of 235,000, according to a report issued Wednesday by the American Electronics Association and Nasdaq. The rate of growth, however, is the slowest since 1995, the Washington, D.C.-based AEA said in issuing the report, which breaks down the number of IT jobs and salaries by state and provides other data on the U.S. IT industry.

The long-term trend in the IT industry is "extremely powerful" despite the broad decline of technology stocks in the market and the demise of dot-com companies, according to former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who spoke at a communications trade show last Thursday.

Technology executives involved in the Global Internet Project (GIP) met in Northern Virginia for a two-day forum this week to discuss answers to some of the questions surrounding the future reliability, privacy and security of the Internet.

WorldCom Inc. announced its first customer-managed IP (Internet protocol) VPN (virtual private network) bundled package on Tuesday, an offering aimed at customers that want to design and manage their own site-to-site VPNs.

The two groups sponsoring the ebXML (electronic business extensible markup language) initiative say more than 200 IT organizations, end user companies and software vendors voted last week to approve a suite of ebXML specifications developed and tested over the past year and a half.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) awarded a US$51 million contract to DynCorp to upgrade the FBI's IT infrastructure last Friday

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a bill Tuesday that would provide a tax credit to employers that invest in training programs designed to increase the IT skills of their workers.

A company that recruits workers to the U.S. under the H-1B visa program has been ordered to pay the legal fees of an employee it recruited from India who sued the company when it tried to make him pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees and expenses for breaking his employment contract.