San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Study: S.A. has 48,000 IT workers, a third of them federal employees
At least 16,447 cybersecurity professionals employed locally work for the federal government, accounting for about one-third of the city’s 48,000plus information technology workers. And the largest share of that total work at Port San Antonio.
The data, which is from the San Antonio IT/Tech 2022 Employment and Economic Input Study released Wednesday, provides a clearer picture of IT employment in San Antonio than has been available. Researchers have been limited by the fact the Texas Workforce Commission doesn’t track federal jobs — and the feds weren’t talking.
To remedy that, two organizations — Tech Bloc, an industry advocacy group, and
Port San Antonio — approached the Defense Department for help determining the number of IT workers at federal agencies, military commands and national security organizations in the city.
“This is as true a picture of the total IT workforce in San Antonio as you’re going to get,” said David Heard, CEO of TechBloc.
Getting a more accurate count is critical to local economic development efforts, he said.
“Business investment, relocation and technology startup decisions are made every day based on a number of factors, one of the most primary being how much talent does a city have,” he said. “You want to express your true largest number to the world because we’re in a competition to lure in tech talent. … We’ve been misrepresenting ourselves by a third. We’re not putting our best foot forward.”
Besides the number of IT workers in the city, key findings in the study by Trinity University professors emeriti Richard Butler and Mary Stefl include:
The San Antonio IT industry had an economic input of nearly $11 billion in 2020 — a 27 percent jump from 2010 and more than triple its size in 2000.
The city had 1,491 IT companies in 2020, up 36 percent from 1,095 in 2015.
“San Antonio’s IT industry is growing rapidly in the internet and computer services sectors, and this growth shows no signs of abating.”
The study also identified the parts of San Antonio that have the most workers.
The study’s authors refer to IT jobs as they relate to San Antonio’s strongest economic sectors, including cybersecurity, which includes the Air Force’s Cyber Command and private companies — such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton — that support Defense Department online operations; cloud computing, such as Rackspace Technology Inc.; digital retail and commerce, such as H-E-B; and financial technology, services and compliance, such as USAA.
The report provides a list of sites contributing to the tally of local jobs, including NSA Texas, Joint Information Operations Warfare Center, Air Force Research Lab, the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI, among others. Under a government agreement, however, TechBloc and Port San Antonio are unable to disclose how many em
ployees work at each government agency in the city.
Small IT workforce, high-paying jobs
Although IT workers account for a small fraction of San Antonio’s population, which is estimated at 1.5 million, they are among its highest earners, with an average annual wage of $88,017 in 2020, compared with $55,940 among workers in all other industries across the city, according to the latest TWC data.
“The high wages underscore again why it’s so important for our local economy to lure and create tech jobs and to build out this industry,” Heard said.
“This is one of our best strategies for increasing median household income and economic prosperity for our city. We are a poor city on average.”
In a separate report released this year, the city’s annual median household income in 2020 was $53,420, according to the 2016-2020 American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates. That was more than $10,000 less than the statewide annual median household income of $63,826 and the national figure of $64,994.
The latest report indicates that total payroll in the IT industry jumped to about $1.8 billion in 2020, more than three times the $500 million recorded in 2000.
Still, employment numbers remain low.
“This is due in part to the relative shift of IT activity in San Antonio from the production of products to the provision of services,” the researchers said.
The report highlighted two sectors of San Antonio’s tech economy: the products sector, which includes manufacturers of computer and electronic equipment components, retail and wholesale trade, and internet and software publishing; and the services sector, which includes providers of computer programming and internet services, web hosting companies, IT training and equipment repair services.
In 2000, the products sector employed 30 percent of IT workers and generated half of the industry’s economic impact. By 2020, the products sector dropped to 25 percent of the jobs but increased to 55 percent of the impact.
In recent years, San Antonio has “become a mecca for large data centers,” with local companies such as Rackspace and Frost Bank, along with international companies such as Microsoft Corp., Lowe’s and JPMorgan Chase & Co. moving into the Northwest Side, the researchers said. Their presence coincides with a rise in computer services and the growing computer systems design and programming subsector, which employed 41 percent of the IT workers in 2020, up from 34 percent in 2010.
“Many of the internet services functions like web hosting produce large revenues with very small workforces,” the researchers said. “These jobs pay well, and their economic impact is large, so the region has gained greatly from this evolution, even as employment has grown relatively slowly.”
Where tech works in San Antonio
For years, there has been a dizzying amount of marketing to identify urban tech hubs in San Antonio’s downtown and midtown areas by company spokespersons, real estate developers, financial investors and city officials. Meanwhile, some suburban zones that received no branding have blossomed as new areas of tech growth.
“It became exhausting constantly swimming through a lot of beliefs and statements and stories about which parts of towns were the tech hubs, and we thought going through the empirical data would tell the truth,” Heard said.
To get a clearer picture of where the most IT professionals work, the Trinity researchers analyzed job data from the TWC and federal agencies and broke it down by ZIP codes to identify the top five tech clusters in the city.
The data showed that Port San Antonio, the 1,900-acre campus housing more than 80 private sector and militaryaffiliated organizations on the Southwest Side, is the city’s top hub for IT employment.
“When tech workers get up in the morning and go to work … the largest place they go due to a great deal by federal and DoD employment is Port San Antonio — by a country mile,” Heard said. “They were about twice as large as the next largest tech employment in town.”
At No. 2 is the U.S. 281 North Corridor between Loop 410 and Loop 1604,followed at No. 3 by Westover Hills, Loop 410 and Texas 151.
“You got the NSA and data centers,” Heard said. “A lot of people don’t think about it. You think about downtown and midtown. But then there’s Westover Hills, which is a tech juggernaut.”
The city of Windcrest in northeast Bexar County, home to Rackspace, came in at No. 4. And at No. 5 is the South Texas Medical Center area on the Northwest Side.
“The largest tech employer in town is USAA,” Heard said, noting that it has more than 16,500 employees on the campus. “A large chunk is digital, compliance and IT.”
San Antonio’s downtown has received much financial and marketing investment to grow over the years and has attracted small startups.
The report highlights downtown, midtown and Broadway as the fastest-growing hubs of IT employment in the city, but the area still ranks below the other hubs in number of workers.
“Downtown is less of an employment story than it is a startup story,” Heard said. “The largest concentration of very small tech companies and startups was found to be in downtown.”