Optimism about jobs and personal finances by IT workers surged in October to its highest level of the year, according to a report released Thursday by Hudson, a staffing, outsourcing, and human-capital consulting unit of Hudson Highland Group. Since the beginning of the year, Hudson has been conducting phone interviews with about 9,000 workers in various industries, including about 350 IT workers.

Using a confidence "base score" of 100, IT worker confidence in October hit 120.8, its highest level in 2004 and an increase of 8.7 points over September, when it had dropped to 112.1. Confidence levels hit a low of 101.2 in May, but had been increasing monthly during the summer months, peaking at 115.9 in August.

The strong recovery of confidence in October apparently shows diminishment of uncertainty experienced by many IT workers in September, when anxiousness about IT budgets for 2005 and nervousness about personal finances spiked. IT workers were also more optimistic in October than workers in the other industries Hudson tracks, including accounting, finance, health care, and manufacturing, although confidence levels of all groups as a whole also rose in October to 108.5, from 106.9 in September.

Meanwhile, optimism is apparently not limited to the job prospects of IT workers. In a separate report released Thursday by executive search firm ExecuNet, the hiring of new executives in the technology industry is expected to increase during the next three months. That's according to a survey of 106 executive recruiters. The recruiters surveyed expect the high-tech sector will be the third-most-active industry generating executive-level jobs in coming months. The medical/pharmaceuticals industry is expected to be the top sector generating new executive posts, followed by health care, then technology.

The last time ExecuNet conducted this survey of recruiters, in August, high-tech ranked sixth in the number of new executive jobs expected to be filled.