Colorado fell from first to third place for its concentration of high- tech workers, according to a report issued Monday by AeA, a high-tech trade association.
The state had held the No. 1 spot for nine years until the most recent report.
The report, “Cyberstates 2007: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry,” ranks Colorado third – behind Virginia and Massachusetts – in the number of private-sector high- tech jobs per 1,000 workers, with 86. Virginia had 89 high-tech workers per 1,000.
AeA based its report on 2005 labor statistics in 49 categories, counting 158,095 high-tech workers in Colorado. That’s down 1 percent, or 1,700 jobs, from 2004. In 2003, AeA reported that 91 of every 1,000 workers in the state held a high-tech job.
But local companies and other organizations say those numbers don’t present a full picture of high-tech growth at companies across all sectors.
“Technical talent is in higher demand. Technology is a bigger portion of overall work,” said Greg Barman, a tech recruiter and spokesman for the Colorado Technical Recruiters Network. “As technology has continually improved, and companies have sought to update systems, there’s been a never-ending series of work for people.”
Jessica Wright, executive director of the AeA Mountain States Council, which represents technology companies in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, attributed part of Colorado’s drop to acquisitions of companies with large local operations, such as StorageTek and Maxtor in 2005, which resulted in job cuts.
Job losses at computer manufacturing and makers of peripherals, such as external hard drives or printers, led to the state’s ranking slippage, she said.
“It’s a movement of those jobs out of state,” she said. “Acquisitions have been happening for a number of years; companies have been restructuring their departments.”
The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment counts high-tech jobs more broadly than the AeA report, stating that 173,400 residents held jobs in the “advanced technology” sector in March 2007. For 2005, the department reported 172,800 sector jobs, and 173,400 in 2006.
“We do have a high-tech index that we developed that is a bit more generalized,” said Joe Winter, senior economist for the Labor Department.
AeA looked at the number of employees at companies in 49 specific industries, such as telecommunications, computer and peripheral manufacturing and software.
Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., said that a lack of funding for higher education is at the root of Colorado’s falling high-tech stature. He agreed with AeA’s numbers, saying that all states classify their jobs the same way.
Clark said Colorado ranked 13th in the nation for higher-education funding 20 years ago but now ranks 48th or 50th, making it difficult to feed high-tech companies qualified graduates.
“It’s the elephant in the living room,” he said. “The falls have not been dramatic, but the continued erosion of our competitive position is causing us some concern.”
Su Hawk, executive director of the Colorado Software and Internet Association, said the report doesn’t take into account a growing number of high-tech jobs within other companies in the aerospace or financial sector.
“That’s where the real growth is happening. Colorado has an undercounted population of information-technology workers,” she said. “I get very disappointed and discouraged when reports like this come out. We really need to count all IT workers, no matter what industry they’re in.”
The report’s numbers “shortchange” Colorado, said Joan Underwood, spokeswoman for Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton. The company, which employs 10,500 in Colorado, is classified as an aerospace company, although a large majority of its workers are engineers and software developers.
“We’re competing with Microsoft, IBM and Google for college grads,” Underwood said. “The diversity of work is so rich that there’s probably something of interest in just about every high-tech category.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-954-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
