Tech job report for Oklahoma 'doesn't tell whole story'
BYLINE: Janice Francis-Smith
Oklahoma was recently ranked as one of the 10 worst states for technology jobs by an American Electronics Association (AEA) report. But the AEA says their report does not tell the whole story.
In April, the Washington D.C.-based trade association AEA issued its 10th annual Cyberstates report, ranking the states based on industry figures compiled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report focuses on employment, unemployment, wages, venture capital investment, research and development expenditures and other factors to determine which states a person searching for a job in a technology industry might want to examine.
But the definition of a "high-tech job" is not so easy to narrow down, said Matthew Kazmierczak, who helped research the report. For instance, the report does not include any jobs in the biotech sector. The data comes from the federal government, which has its own system for classifying jobs by industry.
"In that system, there is no clear way to try and discern what is biotech, what is the pharmaceutical industry, what is the chemical industry," Kazmierczak said. "It's not clear where exactly biotech stops and those other industries start. Generally, if there was ever a grouping or a categorization that was something questionable, we opted to leave it out just to make it conservative. So that way, we're just talking about the numbers and not so much a definition that's too encompassing. "
The Cyberstates report does examine labor statistics involving Internet and telecommunications services and manufacturing of tech products such as semiconductors and electronics. According to the report, the leading high-tech industry sectors in Oklahoma for 2006 are telecommunications services, engineering services and computer systems design.
The report focused on just 3,065 businesses with a total payroll of $1.8 billion - paying less than 38,000 workers an average wage of $48,796. For every 1,000 private-sector workers in Oklahoma - paid an average wage of $31,600 a year - there are 33 workers employed by a high-tech firm at a wage 55 percent higher than the state's average wage, the report finds. Nationwide, the average tech industry wage is 86 percent more than the average private sector wage.
Oklahoma is one of just seven states - along with Montana, North Dakota, West Virginia, Mississippi, South Dakota and Wyoming - where the average tech worker makes less than $50,000 a year, according to the Cyberstates study.
The states identified as leaders of high-tech by the Cyberstates report are California, Florida, Texas, Virginia and North Carolina. California has added more than 14,000 new tech jobs between 2005 and 2006, the report shows.
Though Colorado has held one of the top spots in the Cyberstates reports for the past 10 years, this year Colorado was counted as one of the worst states, having lost more than 1,600 tech jobs in a year's time. However, Colorado still retains a high ranking for concentration of tech workers, with 86 high-tech jobs for every 1,000 private sector jobs.
But information compiled from federal statistics by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce depicts a more encompassing - and more favorable - picture of Oklahoma's standing in the technology industries. In Oklahoma's High Technology Report from 2006, the state included all employment in high-tech industries, not just technology-related occupations, from 46 industries identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as high-tech industries.
Between 2000 and 2005, Oklahoma lost 7.7 percent of the jobs in its high-tech sector, compared to a nationwide average of a 9.5-percent employment loss, the report shows. In 2005, tech employment in Oklahoma outpaced the national average in the areas of mining, transportation and warehousing, information, administration and other services. The oil and gas industry accounted for 39.5 percent of all mining sector employment in Oklahoma, in 2005. Oklahoma's oil and gas extraction industry accounted for 11.2 percent of the entire nation's industry employment in 2005.
Though nationwide the telecommunications industry lost jobs, Don Cain, president of AT&T Oklahoma, said the future looks bright for telecom employment in Oklahoma. State officials have progressively lightened regulation in the telecom sector over the last few years, which has resulted in "an increase in the number of competitors, an outpouring of high-tech investment, and the introduction of new and innovative products and technology," Cain said.