Information technology professionals in the Baltimore region weren?t lying when they said the 6 percent computer tax could potentially have a crippling effect on thestate economy.
“The tech community in Maryland is an important part of the economic engine,” Larry Fiorino, president and chief executive of G.1440, an IT consulting and staffing firm in Baltimore, said last week before the General Assembly repealed the tax.
A sampling of job advertisement data in the region seems to prove Fiorino?s and other tech professionals? point: There are a lot of IT jobs available in the Baltimore region.
Wanted Technologies Corp., a Quebec City, Quebec-based provider of real-time sales and business data, tracks job advertisements in metro areas on a weekly basis. The company lists which industries have placed the most job advertisements on more than 100 job-related Web sites. IT and sales jobs led the way in the Baltimore region for the week reported March 29.
There were 132,343 total job advertisements in the Baltimore area that week, up from 112,538 ads posted during the same period a year ago, according to Wanted Technologies.
Another job data source, the Dice Report, a career Web site for technology and engineering professionals, ranked the Baltimore-Washington region as the No. 2 “top tech metro area” in the United States, based on the number of tech jobs posted in the region.
“IT professionals in the Baltimore-Washington area certainly are faring very well,” said Tom Silver, senior vice president of marketing and customer support for The Dice Report. “Baltimore-Washington has the third-highest average salary for IT professionals at $81,750 a year, ahead of the national average of $74,570.”
In the Baltimore-Washington region, there were more than 7,700 tech jobs posted as of April 1, according to The Dice Report. The New York-New Jersey region was the top metro area, with more than 9,900 tech jobs posted.
Silver said the area is rich with defense and technology firms looking for IT workers with programing and Internet skills.
“It?s not so much a particular job is advertised, as much as these companies are looking for someone with a certain skill set,” Silver said.
