CompTIA's Cyberstates Reveals Tech's Large Footprint

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the size of the total workforce in the United States as of December 2017 was just over 160 million workers. Roughly 11.5 million of those workers are in IT jobs, according to CompTIA (referring to the same point in time). This means that around 7.2 percent of the workforce accounts for 9.2 percent of overall economic output.

Source: Cyberstates 2018

That makes tech workers almost 28 percent more productive than the average worker across all sectors of the US economy. I have long believed, as do many professional economists, that IT/tech workers (and the IT/tech sector) are a profound driver for the entire economy. When IT/tech does well, so does the whole shebang.

Hopefully this means that the rising tide in IT/tech foretells a buoyed economy looking further forward into 2018 and beyond.

Who Works in IT/Tech 2018?

Equally fascinating is CompTIA's breakdown of the 11.5 million workers who fall under its definition of IT/tech. Here's a chart from Page 6 of the complete Cyberstates 2018 report. It shows an interesting mix of self-employed professionals mingled with those holding full-time jobs.

CompTIA makes the useful distinction between those who work for tech companies and those who fill IT or technology jobs in other companies. Interestingly, the number of workers who do IT/tech stuff outside the IT/Tech company umbrella is around twice as big (7.4 million vs 3.7 million) as those who work beneath that umbrella.

The same ratio holds for self-employed persons as well, though those numbers are much, much smaller (206,000 for self-employed working outside the umbrella, 133,000 for self-employed working beneath the umbrella).

Source: Cyberstates 2018

Where the IT/Tech Jobs Are Growing

Looking at the period from 2000-2017, CompTIA reports various job growth vectors in the IT/tech sector as follows:

? Software jobs have increased by 44 percent over this period.
? IT services and custom software services have jumped by 35 percent during this interval.
? Engineering services, R&D, and testing have grown by 11 percent.
? Telecom and internet services have grown by 6 percent.
? Tech manufacturing has shrunk by 5 percent during this same interval.

To me, this indicates clearly that the real growth in this sector comes from creating and deploying technology atop a technology infrastructure that's fairly mature and robust. It's not so much about building out an infrastructure, as it is about increasing that infrastructure's capabilities, scope and reach.

The growth rate differences between software development and IT services/custom software services and the other areas is pretty dramatic and quite stark. I have to assert that it shows where the sector is headed and where the opportunities are and will be for the foreseeable future.

What Else Ya Got?

The complete Cyberstates 2018 report weighs in at a whopping 151 pages. It's chock-full of interesting, useful and valuable information. I'll be chewing this over and reading it for some time to come. You may want to do likewise, so grab yourself a copy now.

I'll keep you posted if other noteworthy insights emerge as I dig deep through this trove of data. Stay tuned!