IT Report Reveals Steady Strength in Region

Select Greater Philadelphia released its Information Technology (IT) Industry – an Economic and Comparative Assessment of Greater Philadelphia - which shows that for every worker in an IT occupation in 2006 who was employed in the IT-producing sector, an additional 2.5 persons in IT occupations worked for firms in the IT-using sector.

The study, which provides an analysis of the region's Information Technology (IT) sector, including a comparison to other large Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), starts from the realization that IT is an enabling technology used by all industries to increase productivity and to manage and analyze information. With this in mind, the economy is defined in to two ways: 1) IT-producing (ITP) industry, which includes economic sectors that manufacture IT goods, such as hardware, software, and network equipment, or that provide IT services, such as programming, consulting, and maintenance; and 2) IT-using (ITU) industry, which includes all the other sectors that use IT goods and services as inputs to make the non-IT products they sell.

“The purpose of this study is to highlight the size and diversity of Greater Philadelphia's IT sector in an effort to attract more companies to the region,” said Tom Morr, President & CEO of Select Greater Philadelphia. “Our region is home to some of the largest IT-producing firms in the country, and the presence of these large anchor firms also attracts companies that are looking to sell to or buy from them, as well as IT workers who want to work for them.”

Given the business orientation of the region's IT activities, the study estimates that for every one worker in an IT occupation in 2006 who was employed in the ITP sector, an additional 2.5 persons in IT occupations worked for firms in the ITU sector. In May 2006 there were a total of 154,660 persons employed in IT occupations in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington and Trenton Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), 5.2 percent of total employment and above the U.S. share of 4.6 percent . The annual salary for IT occupations in 2006 in the region was $62,954, 44.5 percent higher than the average across all occupations.

“Our region's IT industry has served well in powering economic growth and infrastructure in Greater Philadelphia,” said Mark S. Schweiker, Chairman of the CEO Council for Growth – the governing board of Select Greater Philadelphia – and President of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. “The dominant characteristic of the region's IT-producing sector is that firms here have traditionally developed and provided IT goods and services to individual economic sectors or industry verticals; especially in Financial Activities, Professional and Business Services, Information, Education and Health Services, and Manufacturing sectors.”

In 2007 there were more than 160,400 private-sector establishments in the region's ITU sector, with additional demands for IT inputs coming from Federal, State, and Local governments. Key findings concerning the region's ITP sector showed an employment figure of 102,300 people in 2007; about 45 percent of these workers were in IT occupations (e.g., programmers, data base administrators, software engineers, etc.).

“The expertise of the region's IT-producing companies has been shaped by the demands of the IT-using firms so that our IT-producing companies are recognized as being very good in taking IT hardware and software innovations and adapting them to create specialized, industry-specific applications,” said Philip Hopkins, Vice President of Research at Select Greater Philadelphia.

The region's college and universities are also a major competitive advantage for the region's ITP and ITU sectors; in 2004/05 they awarded a total of 2,249 certificates and degrees in Computer Information Sciences (CIS), 1,614 of which were Bachelor's degrees or higher.