* Tech job postings on the rise in Hartford, Cincinnati, Miami
Tech job listings are on the rise in some previously overlooked metro areas.
Can’t find a job? It might be time to move to Hartford, Conn.
That’s the metro area with the fastest growing numbers of tech job listings, according to a report by the Dice.com job search site. Hartford led the charge among a host of cities experiencing high job growth outside the usual strongholds of New York, Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley and Boston.
Measured by the number of jobs posted on Dice the first eight months of this year compared to the same period last year, the fastest-growing metro areas are Hartford, Cincinnati, Miami, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver and Seattle.
Tech job seekers may overlook these regions, but they shouldn’t.
“These cities are the unexpected bright spots in a choppy economy that is also buffeting tech employment,” Dice senior vice president Tom Silver writes. “In bucking the macro environment, the gains in these cities … are even more remarkable. As this data illustrates, technology professionals can find valuable job opportunities across the country in bright spots which may have been previously overlooked.”
Tech job listings grew by 30% in Hartford, 28% in Cincinnati, and by more than 20% in Miami, Pittsburgh and Charlotte. Job listings grew anywhere from 9% to 14% in the rest of the top 10 list.
Hartford’s growth was fueled partly by insurance companies seeking new tech talent. In Cincinnati, half of the job listings are for consulting positions. And in Miami – “a small tech market with a hot reputation” – employers are looking for experts in SAP, Oracle and enterprise resource planning systems, Dice reports.
Denver is gaining because it is home both to many tech startups and the IT operations for big companies. Seattle, meanwhile, is surprising in its growth because it already had a large base of tech jobs. “In the market for talent [in Seattle] are big names such as Boeing and Microsoft along with startups like Zillow.com,” Silver writers.
While these cities had the highest growth, they still aren’t close to overtaking the traditional tech centers for the most job listings. Overall, the highest number of jobs are available in New York/New Jersey, Washington D.C./Baltimore and Silicon Valley, followed by Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Seattle, according to Dice. The New York/New Jersey area along has accounted for 9,109 job listings on Dice this year, more than 10% of the nationwide total.
On another topic, Dice statistics point to a trend I wrote about a few weeks ago – growing demand for database administrators.
Through Sept. 2, there have been 18,446 Oracle database jobs posted on Dice this year, and 13,365 for SQL. Those are huge numbers considering the total number of tech jobs posted on Dice in the same time period, which is 85,585.
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) just released a report looking at the salaries of database professionals, and found some good news. “Almost 30% of DBAs overseeing critical IT operations now receive six-figure incomes for their skills,” the IOUG reports. Database developers and analysts aren’t doing quite as well, typically earning about $75,000, and receiving raises of only 1% to 3% this year.
In addition to technology expertise, database administrators need a real understanding of how the business operates in order to do their jobs most effectively and get ahead in their careers, says IOUG President Ian Abramson.
“A lot of people can do coding, a lot of people can administer databases,” he says. “But to do it well and do it effectively, you really need to understand the business processes that underlie the job you’re trying to perform.”
