A newly commissioned report is claiming that the success of Pittsburgh's future tech sector weighs heavily on the region's ability to increase its workforce and to ensure these employees come from diverse racial backgrounds, among other challenges.
For its report titled "Assessing Pittsburgh’s Science- and Technology-Focused Workforce Ecosystem," the RAND Corp. compiled quantitative data about the seven-county region’s science and tech industry to then compared these figures with those for the nation, as well as with two cities that RAND identified as peers to Pittsburgh: Boston and Nashville. The nonprofit research organization also enlisted the use of focus groups for the report, which was funded in part by the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the Henry L. Hillman Foundation and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.
According to the report's findings, various levels of government and business officials must take action to "safeguard the region’s strengths and further its ability to compete with other technology hubs."
More specifically, RAND said that additional effort is needed to increase the size of the region's science and technology workforce by creating policies that would result in a workforce that is more racially and ethnically diverse. In the report, RAND noted that focus group participants cited difficulties with recruiting and retaining workers of color. For some of the participants, this stemmed from a perception that there is "an overall lack of exposure" to science and technology jobs available to all workers in the region and that there are "unclear pathways into and within the science and technology workforce" for people of color.
Also important, the report stressed, is making participation in the local tech industry easier for those residing beyond the urban core of Pittsburgh and even Allegheny County. This will require the creation of a new regional and multi-sector strategy that, the reported theorized, could lead to better opportunities for the overall ecosystem's growth.
Furthermore, the region is poised to require even more workers for this sector in the future, which comes amid a present backdrop of a region that is seeing its population stagnate in many areas while it declines in others overall. Put another way, "Pittsburgh lacks the population inflows that can contribute to innovation," the report found.
"A lack of in-migration to the region from both outside the state and outside the country, coupled with population losses, threatens the region’s future ability to supply a workforce for growing companies," Melanie A. Zaber, the study’s lead author and an economist at RAND, said in a prepared statement. "Additional investments and changes to policy can safeguard Pittsburgh’s strengths and support the region as a flourishing science and technology hub."
RAND found that about 18% of Pittsburgh’s employment works in science- and technology-focused occupations, higher than the national figure of 16% and a figure that has grown its share in the overall regional labor force between 2015 and 2019. Health-related occupations feature the largest concentration of workers among the broader Pittsburgh science and tech sector, accounting for 43% of jobs. RAND found that Pittsburgh’s overall science- and technology-focused workforce is also older and less racially and ethnically diverse than those of its peer regions.
The report goes on to theorize that investing in policies like wage increases could improve the local tech sector's competitiveness at the national level, which already has an edge when it comes to having more affordable housing and other cost of living expenses that are lower than those of its peers. Other policies, like those that reduce barriers to entry and encourage startup company development "could improve the productivity of the science and technology ecosystem and drive economic growth," the report said.
Over the past decade, RAND found that the Pittsburgh region has seen $10 billion invested in local tech companies, of which $3.5 billion came from 2021. To see sustained growth of figures like these requires action, the report said.
