| July 2006 |
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| Demographic shifts and a commitment to technology should bring years of growth |
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| Just a few miles southeast of Phoenix is the satellite city of Chandler, Arizona, population 243,000 and rising fast – it's up 37% since 2000. Chandler loves technology a whole lot. An impressive 75% of the city's manufacturing jobs are high-tech-related. Intel, which has a huge campus there, employs 10,000 people and has recently put the finishing touches on a $2 billion chip fabrication plant that has added 1,000 new jobs. All in all, 80 manufacturers employ over 30,000 people in Chandler, and over 75% of local manufacturing jobs are high technology.
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It's all part of a clever master plan designed to build an economy based on technology, and there's more to come. Chandler's city council is planning to fund a $15 million community technology incubator to attract even more technology companies, especially those in bioscience and nanotechnology. It's no secret that high tech is finding a happy home in the rapidly growing desert southwest city of Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs.
The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey has found that in the third quarter, 36% of the companies interviewed in the area plan to hire more employees. “Phoenix-area employers have stronger hiring intentions than in the second quarter, when 25% of the companies interviewed intended to add staff,” said Manpower spokesman Joseph Tuerff.
Meanwhile, IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology's third-quarter IT Hiring Index finds that a net 13% of Phoenix CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter.
After an outstanding first quarter, Dice.com job listings in the Phoenix area continue to rise, up 8% in the second quarter, from 1,269 in March to 1,372 in June.
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| 13% of Phoenix CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter. |
| - Robert Half Technology's third-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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It's no real surprise that the tech sector is hiring. In an extensive May 2006 study titled "High-Tech Powers Arizona's Economy," William P. Patton and Marshall J. Vest wrote that technology is a "vital component of the state's economic future." They added that Arizona has more than a quarter million technology jobs, 11% of total employment, generating 19% of the state's total wages. The types of technology most strongly concentrated in the Phoenix area: communications, semiconductors (e.g. Intel), and aerospace. "In the future," said the report, "new high-tech industries such as bio-industries, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnologies, optics, telecommunications, software development, and unidentified industries of the future not yet incubated, will provide high incomes, jobs, wealth, and a more diversified economy."
Besides Intel, Arizona's semiconductor industry includes Motorola, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, and ON Semiconductor. The instruments manufacturing industry includes Honeywell, General Dynamics, Medtronic Microelectronic Center, and Universal Avionics Systems.
Phoenix and Tucson are also honored as two of the top 10 "fast cities," according to the November, 2005 issue of Fast Company, a ranking that measures, among other things, the number of engineers, scientists, and cultural professionals that live and work in the city.
Kevin Knaul, Executive Vice President of IT and Telcom for Hudson, the large national job placement firm, sees an inevitable migration of people and jobs into the area. "Companies see the population trends and follow the crowd to where they know the employees of the future will be." According to Tech Connect magazine, some of the hottest Arizona tech industries outside traditional chip manufacturing will be optics, flexible displays, vaccine development, medical imaging, solar technology, water remediation, and fuel cells.
So it's not just chips. As the population of the desert Southwest continues to swell in coming years, Phoenix hopes to attract armies of skilled tech workers of all stripes and to welcome the companies that will give them good jobs to suit their talents.
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| Dice job postings in Phoenix are up 20% since Jan. |
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