RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – North Carolina ranks ninth for technology job openings in the U.S., a new report says, a ranking consistent with its standing as the nation’s ninth largest in population.

Nearly 7,000 jobs were being advertised across the state as August came to a close, according to data gathered by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information technology (IT) industry and workforce.

The numbers are down, however, from July – dropping 755.

The N.C. Tech Association reported a much larger number in July at more than 17,000. Data for August is expected to be reported in the near future.

Tech job openings in Triangle, NC climb for 2nd straight month

The national picture

Technology sector companies in the aggregate added workers for August while employers throughout the economy reduced tech occupation staffing.

Within the tech sector, employers increased employment by 12,643 positions, according to CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics #JobsReport data. Employment growth was led by new hiring in IT and custom software services and systems design (+10,400) and cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting (+5,800).

Tech occupations throughout the economy declined by 189,000 positions.[1] The unemployment rate for tech occupations rose slightly to 2.1%, moving directionally with the increase in the national unemployment rate to 3.8%.

“The usual caveats of monthly fluctuations in labor market data apply,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The seesawing between strong and lagging tech jobs reports is undoubtedly confusing, but the overall macro trend of growth in the depth and breadth of the tech workforce remains steady.”

Employer job postings for future tech hiring totaled nearly 208,000 in August, a slight decline of 1.4% from the previous month.[2] Job postings for information security analysts increased 19% from July to August, to more than 12,000 postings. Other in-demand occupations include software developers, tech support specialists, computer systems analysts and data scientists.

Denver, Washington, Phoenix, Tampa, Philadelphia and Baltimore led metropolitan areas with the largest increases in the number of tech job postings from July to August. Lansing, MI, Colorado Springs, CO, Denver, Tampa, Phoenix, Huntsville, AL and San Diego saw notable increases on a percentage change basis.

By industry, employers in the professional, scientific and technical services, administrative support and manufacturing sectors has the largest share of tech job postings came from

Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills accounted for 23% of all tech jobs postings in August. Within emerging tech job postings, 37% were associated with artificial intelligence (AI). California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts and Virginia had the highest numbers of AI-related job postings.

The “CompTIA Tech Jobs Report” is available at https://www.comptia.org/content/tech-jobs-report.