| April 2006 |
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| Dice job postings in Philadelphia are up 29% |
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Philadelphia is squarely rooted in the past but when it comes to looking ahead, the city’s technology industry is the key to its economic future.
This past year Philadelphia began to show strong signs of rebounding from the difficult downturn the industry took when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. The largest growth area for the Pennsylvania tech industry is in computer system design and related services, which added some 5,100 jobs, according to a new report from AeA, the nation’s largest trade association for the high-tech industry.
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The report, "Cyberstates 2006: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry,” showed that Pennsylvania exported $3 billion in high-tech goods in 2005, accounting for 13 percent of the state’s total exports.
"As the nation’s eighth largest cyberstate, it is critical that Pennsylvania prepare itself for an increasingly competitive world,” said Linda Klose, Executive Director, AeA New Jersey-Pennsylvania Council.
The center of Pennsylvania’s tech job market remains in Philadelphia.
Technology job listings for the Philadelphia area on Dice, the leading technology career site, increased 29 percent during a recent three-month period, from 3,017 in December to 3,896 in March.
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| “The largest growth area...is in computer system design” |
| - AEA Cyberstates 2006 |
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“Philadelphia is showing strong signs of growth in its IT job market,” said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice. “And in actuality it is heating up right now. Many of the hiring companies and recruiting agencies who use Dice observe a tightening labor market, and salaries are starting to trend higher as a result.”
Nationally, Cyberstates 2006 shows that the high-tech industry is moving forward.
In the next 10 years, nearly 1 million new computer specialists and 200,000 new engineers will be needed, predicts William T. Archey, the president and chief executive of AeA.
And tech salaries are beginning to reflect the industry’s growing needs, according to several national indicators.
Nationwide, the average high-tech salary grew 5.1 percent in 2005, a telling leap compared to a year earlier, when it grew at 4.3 percent, according to Moody’s Economy.com.
This year alone should see the creation of 217,000 new tech jobs in the United States, Virendra Singh, a senior economist at Economy.com, said.
Singh also expects the job-growth trend to remain steady through at least 2010, with an additional 126,000 tech jobs created in 2007 and 123,000 more in 2008.
“Things are looking very good all around,” Economy.com’s Singh said.
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