Best and Worst states for Tech jobs ?

What are the Best and worst cities / states for Tech jobs ?

I am trying to move from Chicago to Wisconsin and I noticed that there are barely any jobs in Wisconsin (CCNA, MCSE) type.

So how is your area with regards to job openings for tech positions ??

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TechGuy215

Information Technology Industry - June 2013 | Indeed.com

The above will give you a pretty good idea of where the most IT related jobs where listed (by City). Also contains position titles, salaries, and keyword searches. I've been using Indeed.com for a long time, infact it's how I found my current job!

sratakhin

Best states - everything on the coasts.
Worst states - everything in between.
Pretty much.

vanquish23

Atlanta? Ha. Have you seen Cisco keyword searched. 83 results.

filkenjitsu

Chicago is a great job market!

Ismaeljrp

Atlanta is one of the best job markets for IT. And considering the cost of living being so low, and payrates being almost as high as NY. I'm really considering relocating there, search Network Engineer. Plus Cisco isn't the only IT technology.

ThePrimetimer

Well, I'll tell you right now that Montana isn't going to be very high on this list! LOL

Moon Child

Yeah sometimes where you live can really suck. I live in the middle between the coasts so I can relate. A lot of jobs where I am at are in the trades and not in IT. Co-workers I previously worked with in IT said they moved out to California at first and worked out there because they couldn't find any work around here, then after they got a few years of experience they moved back home and were able to get a job here. IT can be a very tough industry to get into in some parts of the country.

filkenjitsu

I moved from Tennessee to Chicago to get past being stuck in entry level work. Will never move back lol!

goldenlight

IM gonna say Northern Virgina near Washington DC.

Be Warned the Cost of Living is HIGH..

loxleynew

Here in Denver there are tons of IT jobs strangely. When I was looking about 2 months ago and landed my job there were about 10 new jobs a day posted it seemed like. Maybe that's not as high volume as some other places though.

whatthehell

Really liked your link --- very interesting info --- though Graphic design??

TechGuy215 wrote: »

Information Technology Industry - June 2013 | Indeed.com

The above will give you a pretty good idea of where the most IT related jobs where listed (by City). Also contains position titles, salaries, and keyword searches. I've been using Indeed.com for a long time, infact it's how I found my current job!

it_consultant

loxleynew wrote: »

Here in Denver there are tons of IT jobs strangely. When I was looking about 2 months ago and landed my job there were about 10 new jobs a day posted it seemed like. Maybe that's not as high volume as some other places though.

It isn't that strange. Denver is a NFL city with a huge technology investment. Boulder is one of the top cities in the US for tech startups and the Denver Metro area has Oracle, Microsoft, HP, IBM, basically all the big kahunas. I live within biking distance of a huge Oracle campus (formerly Sun and StorageTek) and Brocade in the Broomfield Tech area. That is just Broomfield, the DTC and Boulder has much more.

neo9006

That is weird about the graphic design part, go figure I am getting my degree in Web and Media Design, wouldnt mind moving but not to Denver, wife would kill me lol.

filkenjitsu

Texas: Dallas/Ft. Worth and Houston

coreyb80

filkenjitsu wrote: »

Chicago is a great job market!

I'm going to have to agree with this statement.

ptilsen

TechGuy215 wrote: »

Information Technology Industry - June 2013 | Indeed.com

whatthehell wrote: »

Really liked your link --- very interesting info --- though Graphic design??

Hate to jump in and be such a naysayer, but that link tells us absolutely nothing of value. First, the top locations numbers are under "Clicks", not "Postings." This shows where people are clicking on links, not where there are job openings. It's actually showing where there are prospective IT professionals, nothing to speak of the ratio of professionals or at least total eligible workforce to openings (which is the most important piece of data we would need, if not the only piece of any real importance) Second, even if it showed us number of postings based on location, it isn't correlated with eligible workforce size or eligible IT workforce size, so again, we can't get the above ratio from it easily (at all, with IT professionals). Finally, the fact that there are five titles which are clearly not IT in the listing casts serious doubt on the data itself.

This link from the same Indeed states at least gives us something useful about the market, but not the IT market, specifically:
Where are the Jobs? | Indeed.com

That being said, official BLS unemployment numbers for states or metropolitan areas is going to tell us a lot more about a given job market.

Ultimately, I haven't seen any useful data specifically on IT job openings relative to prospective local employees. This is the data we need to say an area is hot for IT, specifically, without using anecdotes. Since we lack this, we must rely on general employment numbers and anecdotes.

The top cities in that listing are not a bad start. Indeed is a very good source, and I think it will correlate highly with IT professionals, which are almost certainly the most digitized type of job posting (compared to say, food service positions which might simply be advertised with a "help needed" sign). I would argue that it is better than BLS data in this regard, given that BLS data captures a lot of non-IT positions that Indeed really won't reflect. Combine this listing with BLS data and you start to see good states and metros. Combine it with our collective perceptions, and you get a better picture.

SoCal and Seattle are huge for IT, based on what I've seen here, on job searches, and with the knowledge that many (most?) of the biggest names in tech are based out of one or the other. Better markets for developers, perhaps, but still good for infrastructure. I wouldn't like twice at SoCal for most fields, but tech is one I would. I've seen a lot of similar evidence for D.C. and surrounding areas. The federal bureaucracy and related industries (e.g. defense contractors) seem to drive up IT needs in these areas. I've seen a lot of good things about Chicago and Minneapolis/Saint Paul from personal experience, overall economic picture, and other people here and in the industry. The twin cities are particularly great overall, being one of the best combinations of quality of life, cost of living, unemployment, and salaries, and I have to stress from my personal experience that at least at mid-level and above, the market is really, really good. I see a lot of high-level network, storage, security, and generalist systems positions, and more. I have similarly seen fairly good data on Texas and Colorado, and again heard as much from people here and in the industry.

So that gives some choices, and there are a lot of things to consider. I think ultimately you should think more about where you want to live, then go for it as long as the IT job market there is reasonable. Making a bit more relative to cost of living because of IT job scarcity is not necessarily going to make you happy if you live somewhere you don't like.

The only areas I wouldn't really consider too strongly are most rural areas and New Jersey. New Jersey, specifically, has really high cost of living and I haven't seen that even high-end IT salaries accommodate for that. That is based on somewhat deep personal research into job openings there, the overall economic picture there, and again, people in the industry and here at TE.

Personally, I probably won't leave the Twin Cities because of how great it is. If I did, though, Seattle, SoCal, and Denver are probably the only places I'd consider, both for the specific companies (and company cultures) present and for what I view as an ideal lifestyle. That's just me. IMO, you should think about yourself and what you want, do some research, and narrow it down to what makes the most sense. The good news is that IT is a great field to be in in most job markets, so you have a lot of good choices.

Moon Child

loxleynew wrote: »

Here in Denver there are tons of IT jobs strangely. When I was looking about 2 months ago and landed my job there were about 10 new jobs a day posted it seemed like. Maybe that's not as high volume as some other places though.

Maybe I should relocate to Denver.

Chitownjedi

Moon Child wrote: »

Maybe I should relocate to Denver.

Denver, I hear, is a great city. I'm partial to going to Austin, TX myself when I relocate.

DB Cooper

Portland Oregon is pretty good in my opinion, granted I cant compare to other locations. But seems if you have the skills finding a job isn't too hard. Bend, Oregon is a bastard to get into.

lilmansdad

May 2012 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates

this has some numbers, not sure how much i would trust them.

Florida bites...

Nyblizzard

New Jersey sucks because everyone is commuting to New York

veritas_libertas

To those in Charlotte, NC, how is IT employment situation?

Rell24

Austin has a lot of companies moving in and is known as the Silicon Hills. Do I quick google search on Austin and companies such as Dell, Apple, HP, IBM, Google and Rackspace show up. That's where I will be looking when I get out the Army.

BigD5X

I'm from Chicago and I would agree that Chicago has a great IT job market.
I live in Greenville SC now. IT job market SUCKS!!! Only reason I'm here is because I was married living in Chicago for a year and my wife living here in SC. It was easier for me to relocate than her. My intentions is to move to and work in Atlanta. What I found out, seems that everybody had the same idea and now believe it or not, Atlanta is over crowded with IT engineers. Had 2 interviews in Atlanta, had to compete with over 17 people for the same job. Although I hear TX is booming.

focushollywood

Check out Atlanta. We moved here 5 years ago from Los Angeles and love it. I have 15 years experience providing tech support and network administration but have not worked in the field at all in 4 years, haven't even set foot in an office in 7 years. I started looking for a job about 2 weeks ago and I have 2 offers on the table now, granted they are not at the level I'm used to but considering how long I've been out of work, mostly due to not looking, I'm thrilled with the offers.