Cities on the Tech Frontier

In October 2023, the Burning Glass Institute worked with the Wall Street Journal to publish a report comparing the tech skills in the workforces of America’s cities. Traditionally, a sector’s regional competitiveness has been measured solely by the size and projected growth of the industry’s workforce with little effort made to capture the quality of the workforce. Skills are the yardstick of competitiveness in the human economy.  Even a large or growing workforce can be at risk of falling behind if it is largely oriented toward legacy technologies. But how can it track these dynamics before it has already lost its edge? Assessing the quality and competitiveness of the workforce requires innovative metrics of skill concentration.

Utilizing real time labor market data, including the Burning Glass Institute’s database of the career histories of over 65 million US workers and Lightcast’s database of US job postings, we identified and analyzed concentrations of “Frontier Skills” – skills that command a high wage premium while also demonstrating rapidly growing demand.

To look at how cities stack up based on their current workforces, we measure the “Share of Workers with Frontier Skills” for each city. For a more forward-looking view, we look to the “Tech Worker Momentum Score” measure, which is a score that accounts for the change in Frontier Skill usage and tech employment growth over time. These two measures vary widely across the nation and, when considered together, reveal which cities are out front, which are on the rise, and which are falling behind.

You can read our full writeup and methodology for this study here.