Tech jobs in Illinois are on the rise, but employment in Chicago took a dip last year.
Illinois added 2,973 tech jobs in 2016, Springfield, Ill.-based nonprofit tech association CompTIA found in their 2017 Cyberstates report, which measures the health of tech industry employment.
CompTIA ranked Illinois 7th in the nation for tech industry employment. 245,674 people are employed by the tech industry across the state, the report found, about 4.2 percent of the overall state workforce. Average wages for a tech job are $99,500, which is about 77 percent higher than the state's average wage. Illinois is home to 24,353 tech business establishments.
Leading occupations include computer systems analysts, software applications developers and user support specialists, but computer systems designs, IT services and internet services saw the strongest year-over-year growth.
However, the tech sector is heavily concentrated in Chicago. About 14,000 of tech businesses are located in the Chicago metropolitan area, and of the 29,000 tech job openings posts in Illinois in Q4 of 2016, 25,595 of those were in the Chicago area.
That said, tech industry employment in the Chicago metro area actually decreased by 1,075 jobs between 2015 and 2016, with the biggest losses in telecommunication services (-4.8 percent), and R&D and testing labs (-4.2 percent).
And while Illinois is highly ranked in tech industry employment, it was ranked in the middle of the pack (24th) in CompTIA's Innovation ranking, which measures tech patents.
Overall, the US tech sector employed 6.89 million in 2016, a 2.7 percent increase year-over-year.
