| April 2007 |
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| The high-tech hub offers plenty of interesting opportunities for motivated job seekers |
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| Last year, the Washington Technology Alliance said that Seattle technology overlord Microsoft intended to spend $1 billion over three years to accommodate 12,000 more employees, most of whom would work at the company's Redmond headquarters. Well, there are still two years and $666 million to go. Microsoft remains the region's second-largest employer (behind Boeing), and overall, King County/Seattle has more than 40,000 gainfully employed software and IT specialists. This highly educated workforce--about half of the population has a bachelor's degree and 20% has a graduate degree--enjoys respectable salaries and the Emerald City's famously enviable quality of life.
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What's the word on the street? "The IT job market in Seattle has been fairly hot in 2007." That's the encouraging assessment from Erik Fleischman, branch manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies. "We saw a huge surge in Q4 of 2006, though it leveled off a bit at the beginning of this year. That being said, however, we have still seen numerous new openings with varying skill sets." Fleischman says C# experts, Java developers, .NET programmers, and Oracle experts are all in demand, and he identifies healthcare as a particularly strong IT market at the moment.
What other job skills are most in demand? Business 2.0 magazine's list of fastest-growing companies identified aQuantive, a digital marketing operation, as one of Seattle's up and comers. A look at its online job listings reveals more than 50 jobs available in all IT categories, everything from software engineering to IT project management.
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| 17% of Seattle CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter |
| - Robert Half Technology's second-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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Deloitte & Touche, which comes out with its own list of the fastest-growing technology companies of the past five years (in terms of revenue), found an impressive 39 of its "Technology Fast 500" in the state of Washington. Among the Puget Sound leaders: Seattle Genetics, WhitePages.com, Global Market Insite, SAFLINK Corp., and Attenex Corp., each of which has grown its revenue over 1,000% in the past five years.
And it's not just these fast-moving and fast-growing companies that are hiring. The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey finds that from April to June, 30% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, according to Manpower spokesperson Jim Nelson. “Seattle employers expect similar hiring conditions to the first quarter when 28% of the companies interviewed intended to add staff,” says Nelson.
IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology, whose second-quarter IT Hiring Index was just released, finds that 17% of Seattle CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter, about average for all cities that Robert Half tracks.
At Dice, the number of available jobs in Seattle has tended to rise slowly but steadily from month to month over the past two years, indicating a healthy tech economy. This quarter, listings are up 11%, part of a typical New Year surge. Meanwhile, the average IT salary in the region rose to $79,787 last year, up 9.14%, according to the 2006 Dice Salary Survey.
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| Dice job postings in Seattle are up 11% since Dec. |
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