IT Jobs by State - First Quarter of 2005

At CityEconomist we have been perusing data on IT jobs in the first quarter of 2006 and were surprised to find that Arizona, Illinois and Connecticut have been growing these jobs fastest of the 15 states with the largest IT vacancies. We have been looking at a two-year span, comparing this last quarter with the first quarter of 2004.

The data come from corporate web sites tracked daily with a web spider developed by my colleague Henning Seip of Skillproof. He checks on a quarter of a million job vacancies every day. We have been especially interested in IT jobs because IT is crucial in driving business innovation.

Arizona IT job vacancies grew 217 percent, Illinois vacancies grew 143 percent and Connecticut vacancies grew 136 percent between the first quarter of 2004 and the first quarter of 2006.

The next seven fastest-growing states were, in order, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, California, Texas, Florida and New Jersey. Only one state, Maryland, showed a decline in jobs (14 percent). The other four, slower-growing, states were Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

On the same basis as the state data, the U.S. metro areas with the fastest-growing IT vacancies over the past two years were Phoenix, where the vacancies doubled; San Jose, where they grew 170 percent, and San Francisco and Seattle, where they grew 130 percent. They grew 157 percent in the Chicago area and 122 percent in the Minneapolis area.

Only one of the 15 metropolitan areas with the most IT vacancies has lost ground in the last two years. That is Baltimore.

The growth rate has been slower in 2005-2006 than the previous year. Two metro areas in southern California – San Diego and Los Angeles – have registered a decline in IT job vacancies in 2005-2006.

The growth in job vacancies has been led by IT sales and marketing, which grew 132 percent over the two years and 42 percent during the most recent year, from the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006.

It was followed in both periods by IT process design and IT management. What this suggests is that the IT jobs that are growing fastest are close to business operations – sale, process design and management of IT services.

U.S. jobs seem to be growing to keep pace with growth among IT service providers overseas.

New York City exemplifies the shift in demand for IT skills. Employer demand has increased 50 percent or more in eight skills areas in the first quarter of 2006 compared with a year earlier.

In order of available jobs, the skills that are gaining in demand are: Linux, Sybase, Perl, C# (Microsoft’s C Sharp), Peoplesoft, Offshore team coordination, SOAP and MCSE.

Meanwhile, demand for other skill areas has declined.

In order of available jobs, the declines are in: SAPDB2 (IBM), Websphere (IBM), Windows NT/2000/2003, MQSeries, Weblogic (BEA) and Wireless.

Programmers skilled in Java, Unix, SQL and HTML are in the greatest demand, with an increase of 24 percent or more openings for each skill in the first quarter than a year earlier.
Although software development is not growing as fast as other skill categories, it is still the largest category of skills required by employers.