| July 2006 |
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| Dice listings are up 49% in the first half of the year |
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| Stand on a Providence hilltop and you can imagine that you see the distant glow of Connecticut's two tribal megacasinos just over the Western horizon. But Rhode Island isn't gambling on the future. It's looking for new and inventive paths toward investment, especially in the technology sector.
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Take, for example, the creative thinking behind Innovation @ Scale, a program developed by the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp. (RIEDC) to attract investment. The strategy: to leverage Rhode Island as a laboratory for testing new ideas and "exploring models that network resources and capabilities across traditional boundaries." RIEDC Acting Executive Director Saul Kaplan says that technologists can take advantage of the state's small size, close-knit networks and densely concentrated resources to test new ways of doing business. It's a clever notion. Take the state's diminutive size, which might be perceived as one of its weaknesses, and market it as an advantage to make Providence a full-fledged member of the Boston-New York high-tech corridor.
And it looks like it's working. The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey has found that in the third quarter, 20% of the Providence companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, according to Manpower spokesperson Dianne Torrey. “Providence-area employers have slightly stronger hiring intentions when compared with the second quarter,” said Torrey.
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| 20% of the Providence companies interviewed plan to hire more employees |
| - quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey |
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That sentiment is echoed at Dice.com, where the number of Providence tech job listings rose a powerful 12% in the second quarter, from 697 in March to 784 in June. Since January, Providence listings are up 49% year to date.
In May, the New England Economic Partnership published a report in which it predicted 6,800 new jobs will be created in Rhode Island in 2006, although it didn't break out a separate prediction for the IT sector.
What kinds of jobs are available now? Providence's leading white-collar employers tend to fall into two groups: healthcare and financial services. Within each category is a wide range of career choices in the technology arena. At Citizens Bank, for example, there are currently a variety of technology-related job openings, including senior Unix engineers, senior systems analysts, business systems analysts, applications architects, senior Oracle database administrators and .NET application specialists.
Healthcare and IT will intersect in a new $20 million state program to fund a Health Information Exchange to allow healthcare providers with electronic health records to share their information securely. The goal, according to Governor Donald Carcieri, is to make Rhode Island a national model in the use of IT in healthcare.
And more good ideas are needed. In June, Edward M. Mazze, a University of Rhode Island professor and dean of its business school, wrote in the Providence Journal that, "Our economy continues to move away from manufacturing. Economic growth will revolve around technologies such as computing and communications and the sciences such as physics, biology and chemistry." Both the city and state seem eager to find new ways to attract the kinds of companies and workers who can make that kind of 21st-century economic growth a reality.
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