What percentage of the workforce in your state are IT Professionals? How many people per square mile work in tech? Where does your state rank?
Here’s something interesting that arrived in my inbox on Thanksgiving Day: New Jersey tops a list of states with the highest percentage of its workforce employed in IT. This came off a list that was put together and sent to me by Eskimoz, a Brit-based company that among other things is involved in content marketing.
I’m not sure why a marketing firm would be researching about the percentage of a state’s population that’s employed in a particular trade, but now that they’ve done that they’re throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks. If it does, I guess, they’re hoping that somebody like me writes about it — which is why they sent the results to me, unsolicited, in an email. If they can get it written about, maybe that might help them sell their content marketing moxie.
If that’s their plan, then so far it seems to be working for them. I’m writing about it, and here you are reading about it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you and I aren’t doing our part to keep the wheels of capitalism greased.
But enough of that. Let’s talk about the density of IT workers in the US population. After all, Eskimoz needs us to be impressed with the results of all their labor.
At first it might make sense that New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country, would top the list, until you realize that the density of a state’s population has absolutely nothing — or at least very little — to do with what the folks within that population are doing, consuming, thinking, or just about anything else you can think of.
Or, to use a quote from an unnamed Eskimoz spokesperson that was conveniently included in the presser they sent me: “The states with the highest population don’t dictate a dense IT presence in the workforce. Location density does not dictate competition, but workforce density does since it showcases the percentage of the state’s workforce looking for similar jobs.”
In other words, living in a location that’s crowded with people doesn’t necessarily mean that tech workers are competing with a lot of other people in the local job market, because living in an area where people are packed like sardines in a tin doesn’t always mean there are actually any tech jobs to be had there.
However, living in an area where there are lots and lots of people employed in your field means you’re facing competition. In those cases, if you’re looking for work you might have to do more than merely build a nice LinkedIn page to find a job — because plenty of people are following the same job leads that you’re following.
The Top Ten States for IT Jobs
According to this study, out of New Jersey’s workforce of 4,388,300 people, 179,000 are employed as IT professionals, meaning 4.08% of the state’s workforce are employed in IT. As a percentage of the workforce, that puts the state way ahead of eighth place California, where the IT sector actually employs over three times as many people than in New Jersey.
Also at 20.5 IT pros per square mile, New Jersey also tops the list when it come to the number of IT workers per square mile. Actually, in this category no other state even comes close: New Jersey is followed by Massachusetts with 13.6 per square mile, and Maryland where the number is 10. After that, it’s all single digits.
Here’s a look in numbers at the top ten states in this study of IT workers as a percentage of the workforce:
Carry Us Back to Old Virginny
Being that FOSS Force’s offices are located in North Carolina about 20 miles from the Virginia state line, I couldn’t help but notice a few oddities about these two states, which represent numbers nine and ten respectively on Eskimoz’s density chart.
The first thing is that Virginia’s work force is pretty much exactly the same size as its population (usually the workforce is about half the size of a state’s total population). Northern Virginia borders Washington, DC and Maryland, and there are plenty of high paying tech jobs within commuting distance from those areas in that part of Virginia, which among other things is home to the largest data center region in the US.
There are so many tech jobs in Virgina, as a matter of fact, that IT pros equals 2.79% of Virginia’s total population — the same as for its workforce — making it the largest for that category by far (the next largest would be Maryland, where IT professionals make up 2.05% of the state’s total population). The inflated size of Virginia’s workforce also boosts the state’s number of IT workers per square mile to 5.7, which put’s it just behind New York at 5.8, putting it in seventh place for that metric.
Interestingly, North Carolina, with a population that beats Virginia by more than a million souls, but with an IT worker pool that’s about a third smaller, comes out ahead of Virginia in the workforce density arena, largely due to Virginia’s outside workforce that’s inflated by out-of-state workers.
If this interests you at all, Eskimoz has posted more results from their research online.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
