AV integrators have long been trying to solve their workforce development problem. The workforce is aging, but entry-level workers aren’t replacing those retirees quickly enough.
We’ve written about this issue plenty, highlighting the importance of transforming your company into a modern organization importance of forming educational partnerships and aggressively seeking out that talent.
When someone has a new idea for a tech company, they usually look to the West Coast or a handful of large East Coast cities to headquarter their startup. These entrepreneurs look to these areas to seek investors and make a name for themselves in highly competitive climates.
That has led to a clustering of tech job growth, resulting in just five cities accounting for 90% of all high-tech job growth from 2005 to 2017, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation on how to spread technology innovations across the U.S.
Here’s a breakdown of those five cities and how many innovation jobs were added:
- San Francisco: 77,192 jobs
- Seattle: 56,394 jobs
- San Jose: 52,288
- Boston (chowdah, technology, sports — what aren’t we good at?): 26,066
- San Diego: 19,949
Why U.S. Tech Jobs Cluster in Certain Cities
In addition to a high-cost of living and soul-crushing traffic, those areas all have one thing in common: a concentration of really good colleges and universities. [related]
On the West Coast, there’s Stanford University, California Institute of Technology and University of Washington, to name a few. There’s also tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Qualcomm.
Massachusetts and the Boston area is universally known to educate some of the best and brightest minds at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wentworth Institute of Technology and so many others.
If you’re one of the many integrators that operate between the two coasts, there’s good news: the report’s authors recommended designating up to 10 growth centers across the heartland.
There’s much work to do to boost your local technology economy, and the higher-education piece is a big component of that, the report said.
If you’re near one of those cities, then chances are you’re doing better than others finding talent. If you’re not, consider opening a satellite office in those locations. If you can’t do that, reach out to the leading tech school in your area.
