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- iHaveNet.com: Careers
by Liz Wolgemuth
These cities boast some of the best job opportunities for technology workers
It's a recession, so few things are booming and no city is exactly thriving. But within the tech industry, some cities clearly have more job opportunities than others. Although tech employment overall has suffered along with the rest of the economy, there's been variance: High-tech manufacturing jobs have been shed more rapidly, while IT service jobs--in engineering and in software services, for instance--have fared better. And one future bright spot: Over the next three years, the federal government is projected to make 11,500 new hires in information technology jobs, according to a report by the Partnership for Public Service.
To find some of the best places for tech jobs,
Employers in the southern Atlantic states may outpace the national average in IT hiring over the next three months, according to a recent survey by Robert Half Technology. Thanks to corporate growth and expansion, nearly 10 percent of chief information officers in the region plan to beef up their payrolls in the fourth quarter, Robert Half reports. Atlanta is what Glassdoor cofounder Robert Hohman calls a "sleeper tech city." Its tech industry may not be as well known as those of Silicon Valley or New York, but industry salaries are surprisingly competitive. The city also ranked high in volume of tech job openings in early September and had an above-average ratio of tech openings to employees for many IT occupations, including computer programmer, software engineer, and systems analyst.
Boston has become a hotbed of high-tech innovation in fields such as biotech and software, says
Robert Buderi, founder and chief executive of Xconomy. Universities like the
Compared with the rest of the country, Houston -- like Texas overall -- is doing pretty well. D'Ann Petersen, a business economist at the
Houston's high-tech industry emerged at the end of World War II, when companies moved in to build geophysical instrumentation and automation systems, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve. In the last recession, when the dot-com burst dragged the economy down, Texas "felt the impact longer than many areas, partly because of its large number of high-tech jobs," the Fed reports. Today, Houston ranks high for total tech job postings and has above-average ratios for tech job postings to employment in multiple occupations.
Huntsville, Ala.
A bit of an outlier on a list of extra large cities, Huntsville nonetheless boasts the nation's second-largest tech and research park, Cummings Research Park, which houses 225 companies and 23,000 employees. Aerospace is the city's focus, as the area is home to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the
It's a big city, so, sure, it has a lot of tech jobs. But according to data from Wanted Analytics, New York actually ranks well above the national average in terms of its ratio of job postings to employment in multiple tech occupations. There may be more to come if the city can find a way to benefit from the expanding healthcare industry. A new report from the
One caveat about New York: Although its average pay ranks fairly high on the Glassdoor list, its cost of living is much greater than that of cities with higher average pay, such as Seattle and San Diego.
According to one recent count, Phoenix has 4,200 high-tech companies and upwards of 81,000 high-tech jobs.
A good deal south of Silicon Valley, San Diego is home to the nostalgic Gaslamp Quarter, a picturesque coastline, and a thriving tech industry. Between the
City officials boast that the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of high-tech companies in the nation. San Diego also ranks fourth for tech salary pay, according to Glassdoor data--above the more expensive cities of Washington, New York, and Boston.
Northern California is an obvious focus for tech industry job seekers. Between
San Jose and San Francisco, it would be impossible to find a more tech-savvy population. But San Francisco has a bit of an edge over San Jose in this recession, with an unemployment rate in July of 9.3 percent, below the national average. San Jose, on the other hand, is struggling with an 11.8 percent unemployment rate. Glassdoor's Hohman suspects that the large tech companies with manufacturing operations based in San Jose may have cut payrolls with a bigger hatchet than smaller start-ups and software firms in San Francisco.
Although best known for its software companies, the city's tech sector has enormous potential to become more diverse, says Xconomy's Buderi. According to the
Seattle had among the highest demand ratios for computer software applications engineers relative to supply. This city's tech employees rank third highest in average pay, higher than considerably more expensive cities such as New York and Washington, according to data from Glassdoor.
It turns out the nation's capital needs geeks. From network engineer to systems administrator, Washington has among the highest number of openings in the nation. Washington ranks in the top five for volume of job openings on Dice.com. The Washington metro area's economy has outperformed much of the nation, thanks to the stabilizing force of government--particularly a new, popular, and active government.
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Article: Copyright ©, iHaveNet.com
"10 Best Places for Tech Jobs"