Seattle's 'app economy' rank bodes well for engineering jobs -- Career Center Blog

March 5, 2012

Seattle's 'app economy' rank bodes well for engineering jobs

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By Randy Woods
NWjobs

If it seems like every engineering student who manages to find a job in Seattle is developing smartphone apps, you're not alone in your observation. For the first time, we now have a better idea of how the Puget Sound area ranks in the overall "app economy" spawned by smartphones and social media.

According to a recent study by TechNet, a political consortium of CEOs representing the technology industry, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area was listed as the nation's fourth-largest market for app developers, with about 5.7 percent of the nation's app-related jobs. The other major regions included San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (6.3 percent) and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (8.5 percent) in California, and New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island (9.2 percent). By state, Washington ranked third in terms of market share, with 6.4 percent, bested only by New York (6.9 percent) and California (23.8 percent).

Steve Jobs may be gone for good, but his legacy continues to thrive, not only through his ingeniously designed mobile devices but in the entire applications industry he created virtually on his own. Currently, there are approximately 530,000 apps available on Apple's AppStore alone, with nearly 125,000 publishers nationwide. For the entire universe of smartphones, the number of apps is approaching 1 million, and companies worldwide are scrambling to keep up with the demand for more.

The new positions created by developers of the games, scheduling tools and digital gadgets are helping to fuel the recent reawakening in Seattle's economy. A recent NWJobs.com search for "mobile engineer" tech jobs in the Puget Sound area showed nearly 400 openings, mostly from Amazon.

While the app economy has been calculated by TechNet to be worth roughly $20 billion at the end of 2011, the number of jobs created has been harder to track. "One thing to realize is that this entire business segment didn't even exist until 2007," says John Drescher, executive director for the Northwest chapter of TechNet.

In fact, the app economy is so new that the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't even have the capability to track purely app-related jobs. The closest they come is a catch-all category called "Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals," as defined by the North American Industry Classification System, the TechNet study says.

Using figures from the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online database, TechNet calculated that approximately 466,000 overall jobs related to the development of apps have been created between 2007 and the end of 2011. This figure includes "spillover effect" jobs that go along with app development, such as tech support staff and administrative positions.

In this region, Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Clearwire and HTC have been some of the larger players seeking highly trained engineers over the last five years, along with countless small, independent third-party developers. However, some of the "pure app" companies, like Zynga in San Francisco, are also starting to "open up a presence here in Seattle," due to the deep talent pool in the Puget Sound region, Drescher says.

Most companies are looking for a wide range of expertise, including programmers, interface specialists, testers, managers and support staff. "The basic engineering skills that technology companies are looking for are not enough to fill all of the expected growth," he says, adding that project management experience is also highly sought after.

"We have some terrific institutions here and have some great people coming from this region, and we want to be able to attract talented engineers who are educated here," Drescher adds. "We have every reason to believe [the app economy] will keep growing, and it has the potential for creating many other economic subsets. Who knows what the next one will be?"

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.