Info tech jobs trending upward in Connecticut
It is a data nugget that might surprise many — certainly inside the orbits of Boston and New York City — to learn that by one small but critical measure of the digital industry, the twin technology giants sandwiching Connecticut saw their small neighbor accelerate by them in the past year.
Rookie Gov. Ned Lamont promises to do better yet — and as a new study demonstrates this week, Connecticut has a lot of ground to make up on just about every other measure.
After seeing its information technology job base shrink in 2017, Connecticut recovered those jobs last year, according to new estimates this week by the Computer Technology Industry Association. But the gains were minimal, with the state adding barely 1,000 jobs in the sector that employs more than 140,000 people for a gain of less than 1 percent, and with Massachusetts and New York having nearly tripled Connecticut’s industry employment since the Great Recession.
A closer examination limiting the job counts to IT experts within software, networking and other companies in the IT industry itself, however, and the data suggests Connecticut outstripped Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey for job gains in that subset of the technology economy.
CompTIA estimates employment trends for both jobs in actual IT occupations, like software programmers; and in digital industry companies, to include any job at a company like Datto, the data backup provider that under founder and Newtown native Austin McChord became Connecticut’s best homegrown IT success story of the past decade, adding hundreds of employees in Norwalk where it is based.
Separating out support jobs at companies like Datto, such as administration and sales, Connecticut matched California for growth in programming and networking jobs at those companies, at 3 percent. And Connecticut easily outstripped its larger neighbors, with New York seeing a 0.3 percent contraction and Massachusetts generating just 0.4 percent growth.
If the CompTIA estimates reflect reality, then it is a surprising revelation, and one on which new Gov. Ned Lamont hopes to build. Lamont has suggested that he is best suited to maneuvering Connecticut into position of being able to find the next McChord, given his own entrepreneurial experiences creating a campus cable TV company.
Economic clout: $17.7B
The CompTIA report covers the information technology sector only, not addressing other niche technology sectors of importance to Connecticut such as precision manufacturing or life sciences. But it uses U.S. Census classifications to capture both IT workers across industries, as well as total employment within the IT industry itself. Add it up, and the IT industry contributes $17.7 billion to the state economy, or 7.1 percent of all industries and occupations.
Census data show that the insurance and finance sector remains Connecticut’s most important for overall economic clout, factoring in both jobs as well as average pay for those position, followed by manufacturing, government and health care. But for growth between 2017 and 2018, the Census Bureau identifies household services as the state’s fastest growing job sector — hardly a trophy industry for any state.
Lamont hopes to reinvigorate Connecticut’s IT industry profile, pointing to plans by Infosys and Ideanomics to create IT centers in Hartford as evidence of Connecticut’s continuing appeal to the sector, with the state offering incentives to seal the deals reached in his predecessor Dannel P. Malloy’s final year in office.
Those were two of just a few
“It’s going to bring Connecticut back to life, in terms of what we are going to do in terms of upgrading our IT and telecommunications. That’s the world I came out of, so I care about it.”
Gov. Ned Lamont, speaking to the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce
major incentive packages to get IT or telecommunications industry players to move major operations to Connecticut, alongside broadband giant Charter Communications in 2012. Several others employ armies of IT professionals, however, to include in Stamford where NBC Sports
has a large contingent of digital industry workers.
And more expanded existing operations with state backing, including Deloitte which has a major cybersecurity think tank in Stamford; and hedge funds Bridgewater Associates and AQR Capital Management, where programmers create advance software algorithms for their financial trading platforms.
Speaking in Danbury last
week, Lamont said the state will “radically transform” its own IT infrastructure during his first term, modernizing it to match the online services people have come to expect in their own daily lives. And he said he will make it easier for Verizon Communications, AT&T and other carriers to build out “5G” wireless broadband that can handle the full spectrum of connectivity required for homes and small businesses.
“It’s going to bring Connecticut back to life, in terms of what we are going to do in terms of upgrading our IT and telecommunications,” Lamont said in an address to the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce. “That’s the world I came out of, so I care about it.”