Silicon Valley set for job surge, as New York City threatens to steal tech crown

Though this month’s job figures for tech employees in Silicon Valley remained fairly constant, a new report claims the area is in for a whopping 15% employment surge over the next couple of years, though mainly for high skilled jobs.
Workforce development organization, NOVA, based in Sunnyvale California, even went so far as to say there weren’t enough skilled workers to fill all the jobs being made available in the valley.
“Close to two-thirds of employers report at least some difficulty finding qualified software engineers and field applications engineers, and roughly half have at least some difficulty  filling jobs for quality assurance engineers and project managers,” states the report.
Nevertheless, NOVA says its survey of 251 valley tech firms reveals 60% hope to have full- and part-time employees by this time next year. 25% of those companies polled said they would also up the number of temp and contract workers they employed.
Key job growth areas highlighted in the report included software engineering, with an expected 11% demand increase for the following year, engineering, set to see a 20% boost and quality assurance, with a predicted 12% growth rate.
While those statistics may be encouraging to some, however, to those on the lower-skilled rung of the tech ladder, seeing their jobs move out of town to cheaper locations, it doesn’t mean much.
 

The challenge and its solution, lies in levels of education, says NOVA, noting “when a majority of employers require a master’s degree for many of the most difficult-to-fill jobs, it is critical that the higher education system produce enough graduates to meet the need.”
New York’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, seems to have already picked up on this fact and has already started investing heavily in his city’s tech education, vowing to overtake Silicon Valley as the tech mecca of the US.
“We understand that we will not catch up to Silicon Valley overnight,” said Bloomberg in a speech on Tuesday adding, “”Building a state-of-the-art campus will take years — and attracting a critical mass of technology entrepreneurs may take even longer,” but the commitment and drive to push the project for a new science and engineering campus to rival MIT and Stanford is well underway.
NYC is already a strong contender for the Valley’s tech crown, boasting that it’s already the city with the second most of venture capital funding for technology startups after Boston.