Austin, Texas, has been named the No. 1 “Tech Town” in the U.S. by IT trade group CompTIA, but the District tops the list for sheer number of tech job listings.
Between August 2018 and July 2019, there were 191,905 IT job postings in the D.C. region, according to CompTIA’s Tech Town Index. The number of job listings in the D.C. area was 25,000 more than in San Francisco and 50,000 more than in San Jose, California.
And D.C.-area IT job openings are wide-ranging.
“In D.C., a lot of the in-demand jobs are software development engineers, system engineers, Java developers, but we are actually seeing IT postings across the board,” CompTIA’s Louisa Fitzgerald told WTOP. “Data analysts, senior systems engineers — cybersecurity is another big one for sure.”
Austin ranks No. 1 this year, mainly because of the projected 16% growth in IT jobs over the next five years. But an IT paycheck also goes further in Austin.
“The cost of living in Austin, even though it is rising because of the economic boom, the metro area is still 3.5% lower than the U.S. average cost of living,” Fitzgerald said.
Raleigh, North Carolina; San Jose; Seattle; and San Francisco round out the top five on the Tech Town Index, but many of the cities that make the top 20 for IT jobs and job growth aren’t large cities considered traditional tech industry hubs, such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Huntsville, Alabama; and Columbus, Ohio.
Baltimore ranks No. 20.
You can see CompTIA’s full Tech Town Index on the group’s website.
