A new report headlined “Cities winning the battle for information jobs” from Forbes says the Raleigh-Cary metro area is among the national leaders for information technology job creation.
Forbes recently cited Raleigh-Cary fourth overall for job creation.
With high-tech firms such as Red Hat, SAS and Citrix Sharefile along with others adding jobs, Raleigh-Cary’s percentage of IT workers in the job force now stands at 3.3 percent, Forbes says.
Growth in IT employment reached 2.3 percent from 2012-13. Overall growth from 2005 through the 2009 recession and 2013 reached 5.7 percent.
According to North Carolina Department of Commerce – Labor and Economic Analysis Division, through April some 500 information jobs have been added in Raleigh-Cary so far this year.
In April. Forbes ranked Raleigh-Cary fourth overall among major metropolitan areas for job creation.
Raleigh-Cary’s unemployment rate in April was 4.8 percent, down from 6.3 percent a year ago.
“To come up with our list of the cities with the fastest-growing information sectors, we zeroed in on the 55 metropolitan statistical areas that have at least 10,000 information jobs, which includes software, publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications services,” wrote Joel Kotkin for Forbes. “We used the same methodology as for our overall ranking of the Best Cities for Jobs: we ranked the MSAs based on job growth in the sector over the long-term (2002-13), mid-term (2008-13) and the last two years, as well as recent momentum.”
San Jose, Calif. and San Francisco finished 1-2 in the IT jobs report.
Boston came in third followed by Austin Texas.
Madison, Wis., came in fifth followed by Atlanta and San Antonio.
Phoenix and Nashville finished 9th and 10th respectively.
The Forbes report is available online.
