Thursday, December 9, 2010
Study Tallies High Tech Employment In Region
A recently released study by TechAmerica, an advocacy group for the high tech industry, finds that Los Angeles ranks sixth among the top 60 cities in the United States for high tech employment. The TechAmerica CyberCities report, which was released Wednesday, found that New York led the nation in high tech employment, with 316,971 workers, followed by Washington, DC. (292,969 workers), San Jose/Silicon Valley (225,575 workers), and Boston (219,798 workers). Los Angeles had 169,974 workers in the high tech industry. San Diego as ranked 12th with 110,985 workers, and Orange County was 14th, with 95,047 workers.
Although the study ranked the various parts of Southern California separately, tallying up the employment in high tech in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and Riverside-San Bernardino shows that there were over 400,800 workers employed in high tech in the region for 2009--more than the 394,302 workers combined in San Jose/Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Oakland.
Despite the nearly equal employment numbers, the study also clearly pointed out a big difference in density of high tech jobs between the Bay Area and Southern California; In San Jose/Silicon Valley, the study found that there were 294.07 high tech jobs per 1000 total jobs, the highest in the nation. San Diego was number eleven, with 107.35 high tech jobs per 1000, just beating out San Francisco at number thirteen, with 103.27 high tech jobs per 1000. Orange County had 76.74 jobs per thousand, and Los Angeles was ranked all the way down at 41, with only 50.35 jobs per 1000 jobs in the area attributable to high tech.