High-Tech Jobs Stayed Resilient Amid Last Year’s National Job Losses, TechAmerica Says

The high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs, or about 4 percent of the nationwide technology workforce, as the recession hit bottom last year, according a report being released today. But there are still jobs to be had in high-tech fields. Unemployment in several high-tech sectors remained below 5 percent at a time when overall unemployment soared above 9 percent nationwide, according to the 13th annual Cyberstates 2010 report issued by the TechAmerica Foundation.

All tech sectors lost jobs, but “even during the depths of the recession, most high-tech workers were still employed,” says Kevin Carroll, TechAmerica’s regional director for Southern California. The report, which relies on the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, covers tech employment nationwide in 2009—and provides state-by-state information on employment, wages, and other data in 2008.

Considering all that has happened to the economy over the past year, Carroll acknowledges that the 2008 data for California and other states is too outdated to provide many insights. But he says a few points are worth extracting from the 2009 data:

—The four main components of the high-tech industry—manufacturing, communications services, software services, and engineering and tech services—all lost jobs in 2009.

—Software services experienced the smallest decline nationwide, losing 20,700 jobs in 2009. That’s about one percent of the 1.7 million software jobs that existed in the previous year.

—Communication services lost

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.