| October 2006 |
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| Microsoft and Boeing are just two of the many companies looking for skilled IT workers |
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| Are you smart enough to live in what Forbes.com has called America's third most wired city? According to the Census Bureau, which counted the number of bachelor's degrees among residents over the age of 25, Seattle came in first, with 52.7%. As one news report put it, "Companies headquartered there and in surrounding towns, including Microsoft, Amazon, Cray, Washington Mutual, and Costco, all use heavy doses of information technology. Even another of the area's biggest employers, old-line Boeing, is also a glutton for technological solutions."
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Since the beginning of 2005, Seattle has created 60,000 IT jobs. While some of those jobs are revived positions that first disappeared in the recession of 2001, the overall trend is up, more powerfully up than it is in most other areas (only Washington D.C. comes close). One statewide estimate said there will be another nearly 30,000 openings for computer specialists in the next decade.
Independent IT project manager, Annette Barton moved from Portland to Seattle 18 months ago and has quadrupled her income, landing a series of short and medium-term consulting projects, most recently at a major telecom provider. "Seattle is exploding with jobs," she said. "I sometimes get calls from headhunters several times a day. It’s amazing what moving to a bigger city and having good project management skills has done for me."
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| 15% of Seattle CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter. |
| - Robert Half Technology's fourth-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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"It's surprising how many companies have a presence here," Barton said. "There's Boeing, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, and so many more. The jobs can feel cyclical, especially when a place like Boeing has massive layoffs and then does a lot of hiring a couple of years later, but in general, the demand for my skills is always going up."
Barton warned that the cost of living is relatively high and traffic is "a nightmare," but she considers those acceptable trade-offs for the advances she's made in her career since arriving in Seattle.
Another indicator of the health of the tech sector: venture capital investment. VC investments in Washington State totaled $71.34 million in the first six months of 2006, the fastest pace of investment in at least four years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. If that trend continues through the end of the year, Washington will have its strongest year for VC investment since the heady dot-com days of 2000. Some of that money is green in every sense of the word. The Seattle area is becoming a center for clean energy, green buildings, and environmental technologies.
At Dice, the number of Seattle-area job listings dropped at the end of the third quarter but is still at the level it maintained at the beginning of the year and in the summer. Currently, more than 1,800 listings are available for IT-related jobs.
"Seattle has been a dynamic technology leader for 25 years," said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice. “We see no sign of that changing anytime soon." And this quarter, IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology finds with its IT Hiring Index that a net 15% of Seattle CIOs plan to make new hires.
The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey is also optimistic, reporting that 27% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees in the fourth quarter, up from 19% in the third quarter, according to Manpower spokesperson Jim Nelson. Another 62% expect to maintain their current staff levels. In the final analysis, Boeing's up-and-down business cycles may not matter much. Seattle remains hungry for IT expertise.
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