Oftentimes, when city or state leaders talk about increasing their community’s share of “tech jobs,” they’re referring to developers or engineers. But that doesn’t account for all of the jobs that require the skills that are vital in today’s digital economy.
A new report out today from the Brookings Institution examines the increasing “digitalization” of jobs in states and metropolitan areas across the U.S. Even in places that aren’t traditionally known as tech hubs, more and more of their jobs require digital skills. And unsurprisingly, prominent tech hubs like San Jose and Seattle are home to an increasing number of the highest-level jobs that require digital skills.
The report’s authors — Mark Muro, Sifan Liu, Jacob Whiton, and Siddharth Kulkarni — sought to quantify how “digital” the occupations that make up the U.S. economy are. Using data from the government-funded Occupation Information Network (O*NET) the authors categorized 545 occupations as either “high digital,” “medium digital” or “low digital.”
“It’s been clear that a huge digital change is occurring, but we didn’t really have numbers — that’s what this research is attempting to contribute,” Muro told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
O*NET surveys incumbent workers in every occupation about the skills, training, education, and experience needed to perform their job. O*NET scores each occupation on how much it requires an overall knowledge of computers an electronics, and how necessary computers are to performing the job. The study’s authors combined these two data points to score each occupation on how “digital” it is, ranging from 1 to 100.
“High” digital jobs — like software developers, computer systems analysts, and financial managers — had a score of 60 or higher. Medium-level jobs, such as nurses, lawyers, and sales managers, had a score of 33-60. Finally, “low” digital jobs had a score of 33 or below. Construction laborers and personal care aides are examples of two occupations that fell into this category.
Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of Americans are employed in jobs requiring a substantial knowledge of digital skills. According to the report, nearly 4 million of the nation’s 13 million new jobs created since 2010 fall into the high level category. And they’re paying well — the mean annual wage for a high level digital job in 2016 was $ 72,896, compared to $ 30,393 for a low digital job.
The report’s authors also gave all 50 states and the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas a mean digital score based upon what share of their population is employed in low, medium, and high digital jobs. Naturally, tech hubs like San Jose, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco had some of the highest mean digital scores, while Las Vegas had one of the lowest scores.
A metropolitan area’s high mean digital score can predominantly be attributed to its large share of high digital jobs — and in many places, that number is only growing. All metropolitan areas saw a significant decrease in the number of low digital jobs in their area from 2002 to 2016. But in San Jose, for example, 15 percent of its jobs in 2002 could be classified as high digital. In 2016, that number grew to 38 percent. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, only 17 percent of jobs in the 2016 qualified as high digital, up from 2 percent in 2002.
“Digital technologies are clearly empowering and catalyzing tremendous growth in some places, but they are also contributing to a widening spread of especially high end activity that has contributed to the emergence of the ‘superstar economy’ among cities,” Muro said. And there appears to be some correlation between how healthy an area’s economy is and how many high tech jobs it has — In Las Vegas, the average wage in 2016 was $ 49,404, compared to $ 123,345 in San Jose.
There’s no magical formula that will allow cities with a lower digital score to catch up to places like San Jose and Seattle, but Muro says that there are a number of ways that metropolitan areas can prepare their workers for an increasing share of digital jobs. In addition to committing more resources toward computer science education, Muro says that workforce training programs should also consider educating workers on how to use increasingly popular enterprise tools, like Salesforce and Slack, given how many more jobs require knowledge of more digital programs.
“There’s a very substantial question about social inclusion and whether we are making sure that millions of regular working people, who maybe don’t need to know coding or go to a bootcamp, can nevertheless connect on a meaningful way doing what we call routine or everyday digital work,” Muro said.
