US Tech Jobs By the Numbers
To give some perspective on my last post on tech startups and the jobs gap in the US, could the tech industry actually produce enough jobs to fill the gap? Just how many tech jobs and over what period of time would we be talking about? The current jobs gap is currently 1.29 million jobs, so we are dealing with a huge number of jobs to fill for a sector that does not produce a ton of graduates and is only a small contributor to overall employment.
Pulling numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Taulbee Survey from the Computing Research Associate on computer science college enrollments, we have the following starting stats:
- Total employed population: 127.1 M
- Total employed in software technology sector: 2.6 M (2% of total employed)
- Number of the US computer science graduates per year: 20,000 (bachelors and masters degrees)
If we account for no growth in the number of computer science graduates, we can fill the jobs gap by the time most of us have great grandchildren. Even if we optimistically assume 50% yearly growth the yearly rate in graduates and all things remain the same, it will still take ten years to fill the current gap, and given how things are going, that jobs gap could easily double in that time.
I would not look to the tech industry to necessary become a well-spring of mass employment anytime soon. That being said, we as a nation need to do a much better job at getting our future workforce prepared to take on more technical roles. We need more quality computer science and engineering majors and 20K graduates per year is not going to cut it if our nation is to remain competitive.
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