Austin tech boasted a 10 percent increase in job postings last month compared to the same time a year ago, according to the latest data from the Austin Chamber of Commerce. A new report shows more than 46,000 jobs were open in September, nearly 20 percent of which were IT-related.
The report indicated it’s difficult to hire qualified tech professionals in Austin compared to the rest of the country. But Drew Scheberle, senior vice president of education and talent advocacy for the Austin Chamber, said it’s still easier than in other tech hubs.
“There is certainly competition here, like in other tech centers,” he said. “[But] among tech markets, Austin is still relatively easier to hire for tech talent.”
That’s good news for Austin tech employers and workers alike: The workers’ skills are in high demand, and the companies are in a city where it’s easy to hire them, at least relative to other tech hubs.
National figures can be misleading in Austin, where tech companies as young as SchooLinks and as massive as Apple are setting up shop to benefit from its talent pool. But the glut of opportunities make it a tech worker’s job market, and companies are competing for the most precious business resource of all: people with skills.
And in Austin, that means people with computer skills.
Of the top 20 “hard skills” in highest demand, six are coding, scripting or markup languages. Another seven are descriptions like “software development,” “quality control” and systems development life cycle. Other skills in high demand are linux, unix and customer relationship management.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a talent market research firm called Wanted Analytics assigned a difficulty score to 15 tech-related jobs.
Wanted Analytics based the metrics on the supply and demand of candidates, plus other factors like the location of the job, the pay offered and local unemployment rates. According to the report, the most difficult titles to fill in Austin are computer programmers, which have a difficulty score of 55 nationally and 71 in Austin. Computer and Information Research Scientists have the highest education requirements of all 15 titles in the study, and a difficulty ranking of 66 in Austin. Nationally, they’re ranked only 55.
Overall, it’s a good time to be working in Austin tech, whether you’re trying to hire someone or land a job yourself. Don’t have the skills yet? Austin has several coding schools that can get you up to speed in a matter of months.
