A current analysis of employment prospects in Philadelphia has to begin with some bad news: The biggest year-over-year increase in June unemployment rates among major metropolitan areas belongs to the City of Brotherly Love and its four surrounding counties. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the jobless rate in those five counties increased 1.2 points from 8.1 percent in June 2009 to 9.3 percent in June 2010. Coming at a time when the national unemployment rate is at least holding steady, this is unsettling news.
Having set the stage in such an unpromising way, are hiring prospects looking up in the Philly tech sector? Perhaps. During the worst of the recession, the Pennsylvania high-tech industry, much of it centered in Philadelphia, experienced blips of job growth with a gain of about 3,800 jobs while the rest of the economy stalled, according to TechAmerica's Cyberstates 2010 report.
Today, Pennsylvania ranks eighth nationwide in total high-tech employment (there are 216,000 high-tech workers) and is a leader in several sectors, ranking fifth in electronic components manufacturing, for example. "The fact that Pennsylvania was adding tech jobs at the beginning of the recession when the private sector had already stagnated, points to the ability of tech to withstand this downturn," Peter J. Boni, president and chief executive of Safeguard Scientifics, told TechAmerica.
Greater Philadelphia's information technology sector is the sixth largest in the country, with large presences including ACS International, CAI, Comcast, Computer Science Corp., Lockheed Martin, SAP North America, Siemens and Unisys. In fact, Lockheed Martin, Comcast, Siemens Healthcare, Verizon, and SAP are the area's largest tech employers, a healthy mix of defense, communications, healthcare/pharma, and services. There's also a lively startup scene, best represented by Philly Startup Leaders, a group devoted to building the city's startup community. New businesses feed off the dynamism of the region's 80 universities, not to mention the Wharton School of Business.
Are all these employers hiring? On Dice, Philly job listings currently number 1,691, down on the most recent month-to-month trend but up an encouraging 18.2 percent from a year ago, one more sign that the tech sector is healthier than the overall economy. A quick survey of the top employers' own job postings shows several dozen professional-level IT positions available, with a predominant demand for software engineers of all types. .NET, Java, Oracle and SAP skills are perennially in demand.
As for pay, in the 2010 Dice Salary Survey, the average IT salary in Philadelphia was found to be $78,369. That's around where it's been for a while, and it's just a touch below the national average. Joseph Santora, Philadelphia regional manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies, says that pay scales for the postings he's currently seeing are generally increasing this year, another good sign. "Jobs in functional roles such as project management and business analysis are really seeing an uptick," says Santora. "Companies are starting to spend money getting projects that may have been sitting around for a while back into the pipeline."
Interestingly, Philadelphia is one place where the technology slice of federal economic stimulus funds may also help create jobs. The city's ambitious 2005 "Wireless Philadelphia" plan to make the city into one big WiFi zone never took off once its private partner, EarthLink, bailed out. However, a newly imagined "Digital Philadelphia" plan may use up to $100 million of stimulus funds to created a scaled-back version of municipal WiFi to be used by city government and emergency workers. The funding isn't guaranteed, but City Hall has stated its commitment to build out government WiFi no matter what. Blake Jennelle, the founder of Philly Startup Leaders, has praised the city's "self-help ethos." It may need it now more than ever.
-- Don Willmott