Austin may not have the name recognition Silicon Valley does, but the city possesses one of the best tech talent pools in the country.
A new report from CBRE ranks Austin as the sixth-best market for tech talent in North America. America’s capital of weird earns high marks for its education rate and quality of labor.
The city has the sixth-highest education attainment rate with 51 percent of the labor force holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Its quality of labor trails only Silicon Valley and Seattle. That bustling economy and growing tech sector has also earned Austin the distinction of being the best place to live.
Silicon Valley leads the rankings, with Seattle and Toronto rounding out the top three markets.
CBRE’s 2019 Tech Talent report ranks 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada on both the quality and quantity that the labor pool provided to potential employers. To do so, CBRE scored each market on population trends as well as increased rates of 20-to-29-year-olds, housing costs, educational attainment, office rent and vacancy trends, diversity and its start-up pipeline.
Overall, the report found that both countries churned out more than six million highly skilled tech workers combined. The U.S. alone has more than 5.2 million tech workers and has added more than 693,000 jobs in the past five years.
Despite that growth, the outpouring of tech workers lags behind market demand, slowing down job creation, according to the report. With unemployment at 1.9 percent, it has created growing labor costs and increased competition to attract and retain talent, the report said.
Still, the future looks bright for the talented tech workers in America’s capital of weird.
