Quick overview of the state of Austin high tech employment

The Austin Chamber of Commerce released some tech numbers for 2017 last month.  This should give some perspective and data to the state of the high-tech sector.  The report is short enough to read in a few minutes.  Here are some highlights:
  • There are more than 5800 high-tech firms in Austin
  • Total jobs almost 130,000, or nearly 14% of all jobs
  • Only about 1% growth in last year
  • Manufacturing high-tech is contracting, non-manufacturing high-tech is expanding
A few consequences of these points are in order. 

I would guess that some of these firms are one-person operations not in a position (yet) to hire.  If we assumed that all of them are capable of hiring, it would take contacting about 125 companies a week to check all of them for potential jobs.  That is a lot of resume-emailing.  NB:  It will probably take more than e-mailing resumes to find a good job. I'm doing my job search in a rather traditional manner, and it's just not as effective as I would like.  More on that as I continue to experiment.

The low growth numbers are in part due to the higher risk associated with high tech; these firms are more sensitive to economic downturns.  If you think in terms of some firms growing rapidly while others are going bust, it will make more sense.  In particular, I know that some big companies are laying off thousands while at the same time hiring thousands (for different jobs, of course).  This is clearly activity designed to re-align to the rapidly changing high tech market.

I was surprised to find that we techies are only 14% of the workforce in Austin.  That is higher than the national average, but lower than I would have expected.  So much for my assertion that the Austin job market is dominated by high tech.  Still, the great news is that there are a lot of high tech firms, and a lot of high tech jobs.

Happy job hunting!

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