Michigan’s growing technology industry added nearly 8,000 jobs last year, and industry executives expect to hire even more this year, according to a pair of recently released reports.
Though Michigan may still have a Rust Belt reputation, the state’s high-tech job growth is among the best in the nation. According to CompTIA Inc., a nonprofit information technology trade group, only five states added more tech sector jobs than Michigan last year.
The group said Michigan now has more than 202,000 tech sector jobs.
Many of those jobs are clustered in southeast Michigan around Detroit and Ann Arbor, said Tom Kelly, the chief operating officer of Automation Alley. The Troy-based group argues that advanced manufacturing and other high-tech sectors have to be a key part of Michigan’s economy.
“I think it’s everything,” he said. “Going forward, we have to do a better and better job of understanding and embracing the tech industry.”
According to CompTIA, Michigan’s tech sector employment has increased 27 percent since 2009. Tech sector jobs now make up 5.6 percent of Michigan’s total private sector workforce. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but California — widely recognized as the center of the U.S. tech industry — only has about 8.2 percent of its workforce in technology.
For Automation Alley’s annual report, the group commissioned a survey of tech executives in both Michigan and in Silicon Valley on their outlook and optimism for the coming year.
“Our report showed that the Michigan technology folks were more optimistic about revenue increases, they thought this was a better place to find and keep technology talent, and they thought this was a great place to network and build their business, more so than Silicon Valley [executives] thought about their own area,” he said.
Mr. Kelly thinks the number of people employed in tech sector jobs is likely higher than CompTIA is reporting because many high-tech workers are employed in the automotive industry there, which wouldn’t necessarily show up.
CompTIA also found that Ohio’s tech sector employment is growing, though to a lesser extent. The group said Ohio added 3,525 tech industry jobs in 2015, giving the state a total of about 179,000.
Keith Instone, a freelance IT consultant and one of the men behind Tech Toledo, a grassroots networking and education group, said many of those jobs are low profile but important.
“There’s lots of one-person shops,” he said. “To create a really good software product it takes one good programmer and a couple of weekends.”
Because of that, the tech sector is ripe for entrepreneurship — something Mr. Instone argues is good for the economy.
Like Mr. Kelly, Mr. Instone thinks CompTIA’s figures may be a bit low, but he said at this point numbers aren’t as important as finding a niche and specialty for northwest Ohio.
“It takes a while to develop it, but if we pick something and we grow it, that seems to have more promise than ‘let’s’ go try to get something like Google or Groupon in Chicago and get them to relocate to Toledo.’ That’s sort of the old way of thinking about tech and thinking about jobs.”
Contact Tyrel Linkhorn at tlinkhorn@theblade.com or 419-724-6134 or on Twitter @BladeAutoWriter.
First Published March 5, 2016, 5:00 a.m.
