Where the IT jobs are: 10 American cities

While most industries continue to eliminate jobs to cut costs, career watchers say there are pockets of opportunity for high-tech professionals scattered across U.S. cities.

See a slideshow of the cities with current job openings and salary averages.
See a slideshow of the 20 most useful career sites for IT professionals.

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Research reveals that demand for high-tech workers varies across the country, companies are often seeking less-experienced workers and the types of positions available vary among full-time permanent jobs, contract work and part-time positions.

"The recession is spurring many companies to cut back on their full-time workforces," wrote Tom Silver, Dice senior vice president and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "On Dice, contractor positions now constitute 44% of the job market, compared to 40% 12 months ago."

But that doesn't mean there aren't areas in which high-tech work can be found.

For instance, Beyond.com this week released its first quarter report that showed the IT industry fell among the top two areas for online job postings, behind healthcare and medical. More than 11% of all online job postings in the 15,000 communities Beyond.com analyzes in the first quarter were for IT industry positions. The firm found that the majority (81.58%) of online job postings were for permanent full-time jobs and for candidates with less than one year of experience (59.47%). And according to Dice data as of May 1, 49,016 high-tech job postings could be found online, of which about 30,000 are full-time positions, more than 20,000 are for contract work and just over 1,000 are for part-time jobs.

Dice broke down the number of jobs posted by city and metro area, and the top 10 results might be obvious to some. For instance, major metropolitan areas such as Washington D.C./Baltimore and New York/New Jersey listed 6,817 and 5,341 job postings as of May of this year, respectively. Other cities with a thousand-plus open high-tech positions, according to Dice include: Austin, Texas, with 1,372; Boston with 1,902; Chicago with 2,056; Dallas with 1,451; Los Angeles with 2,022; Philadelphia with 1,557; Seattle with 1,195; and Silicon Valley with 2,534.

Beyond.com found that the "District of Columbia experienced significant growth over the previous quarter and over the past 12 months. In addition, it was the No. 1 state for online job postings per capita and was ranked as the top state within 15 industries, including healthcare and medical, sales and sales management and IT."

As for salaries, such cities are among the higher paying locations for IT professionals. For instance, an IT manager would earn on average more than $88,000 in New York, according to PayScale, but the same position in Columbus, Ohio, pays about $10,000 less. And Bluewolf salary research shows that New York City metro salaries are between 20% and 50% higher than the national average, and additionally, salary ranges in the Northeast and West Coast are approximately 25% higher than the national average – "making them good places for IT professionals," according to Michael Kervin, principal and co-founder of Bluewolf.

The pay range could be based more on cost of living than IT skill sets, one IT industry watcher points out.

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"We survey pay in 82 cities for 130 IT jobs. If you were to rank cities by average salary for, say, senior voice engineers, historically the same cities tend to appear in the very highest [for example, San Jose, San Francisco and New York City] and very lowest [for instance, Oklahoma City and Spartanburg, N.C.] positions due mainly to cost of living," says David Foote, co-founder, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners.

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