New Jersey Employs More Than 200,000 People in Its Tech Sector
According to a new report from the Computing and Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), the U.S. tech sector employment totaled an estimated 6.89 million in 2016, an increase of 182,230 workers from 6.71 million in 2015. Tech industry employment grew an estimated 2.7 percent year-over-year, according to the report entitled CyberStates 2017.
New Jersey employs more than 200,000 people in the tech industry and has more than 16,000 tech business establishments, the report stated. The average wage in the tech industry is $121,075. Tech employment is 5.5 percent of the workforce in the Garden State. According to CompTIA, N.J. these wages are 94 percent higher than the average wage for the state.
The tech sector accounted for approximately 4.4 percent of the overall U.S. workforce in 2016, and 5.2 percent of the private sector workforce. Because of the blurring of lines across industries, there is a degree of under counting in tech sector employment as a percentage of U.S. employment, the CompTIA report said.
Overall employment in the telecommunications and Internet services sector totaled an estimated 1.3 million in 2016, up by 16,610 from 2015. These job gains were driven entirely by growth in the data processing, hosting, and search portal services categories, where employment increased by 35,475 jobs. Wired and wireless telecommunications services shed 14,100 jobs, a loss of 2.0 percent, the report continued.
The software category, defined as fixed products rather than custom development, employed an estimated 357,410 workers in 2016, adding more than 25,000 net-new jobs. On a percent change basis, software led the tech sector with an impressive 7.6 year-over-year growth rate. The IT services and custom software services subsector generated the largest numerical gain in employment, adding nearly 110,000 net-new jobs in 2016.
Per capita, California earned the top slot for innovation, followed by Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, and New Jersey. The methodology used by Cyberstates combines tech patents and tech startup/new tech business establishment data and then factors in the size of the state based on population.
A large, dynamic base of business establishments, also referred to as company locations, is another measure of a healthy tech sector, the report said. The New York City metro area is home to over 24,000 tech business establishments.
The infographic below shows New Jersey tech sector statistics.
