There are more technology jobs available than ever in the Triad’s two largest metropolitan areas.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is the growth in opportunities — in other words the needs of employers — is not being met with a requisite number of qualified candidates.
Not even close.
And with baby boomers retiring at an accelerated rate with smaller generations following them, industries of all types will find themselves facing challenges of a "sansdemic" (without people) for the first time in history.
For now, though, the rapid pandemic-induced acceleration to digital is presenting a short-term technology jobs talent gap with no immediate long-term solution. According to data compiled by Burning Glass Technologies Labor Insights, both the Greensboro and Winston-Salem metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) had a 27% increase in technology job postings from the first to the second quarters of 2021, the largest surge among the state's MSAs.
While they pale in comparison to the numbers of technology jobs in both the Charlotte and Raleigh MSAs, the Triad’s growth in unfilled positions on a percentage basis dwarfs those in Raleigh, where postings actually declined by 1%, and Charlotte, which experienced growth in open jobs of 8%. Closer to the Triad, the Durham-Chapel Hill MSA saw an 8% drop in tech job postings between the first and second quarters of this year.
One of the Triad’s largest tech employers, Inmar Intelligence of Winston-Salem, is a contributor to the growth of unfilled jobs. The digital marketing company has dozens of open tech positions, and David Mounts, its chairman and CEO, said he has been sounding the alarm about the building talent gap for several years.
Inmar Intelligence currently employs 1,014 in the Triad with 52 current open tech positions.
“We're part of that gap, and there are several things happening that are contributing to that,” Mounts said. “I've been watching these numbers for a while. I've been talking about the talent gaps for years. Supply is not meeting the demand of the market, and the reason is because of the education system.”
The large ships that are the public school and college and university systems turn slowly, and Mounts said coordination between industry and the education community to create ample pathways to well-paying tech jobs is developing too slowly to meet the demand. Eventually, he said, that will put a cap on economic development opportunities here.
“We’re at an inflection point right now and we need to be strategic,” Mounts said. “It needs to be aggressive and it needs to be innovative. This will become a ceiling on growth. That is where the economic development battlefield is right now in my opinion. It’s not tax incentives. Those help, and you’ve got to have ready infrastructure, but talent is what tips the scales.”
A job multiplier
If a tech talent gap has been a brewing storm, Covid-19 brought the tsunami as many companies scrambled to establish effective remote work systems and others accelerated e-commerce platforms as retail shifted practically overnight from brick-and-mortar to digital.
Overall, North Carolina has 37,000 unfilled technology jobs. Locally, Greensboro-High Point ranked 56th among 150 MSAs with 1,573 tech job listings in 2Q 2021, up from 1,235 in the first quarter. Ranking 59th was Winston-Salem with 880 listings, up from 695 the quarter prior. That’s not because both MSAs saw a 27% growth in new companies. These were largely from existing employers needing to either expand their tech workforce or filling newly vacated positions.
“When many people think technology jobs, what it means to them is that that's an Apple or Facebook or something that,” said Chris Chung, CEO of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina. “The reality is nearly every company is undergoing some degree of digital transformation, which is essentially pushing more of their processes, their service offerings, their solutions, even their way of doing things to a more digital form than what they have in the past.”
But Apple is coming to the Triangle. Work continues on the computer giant’s 3,000-employee hub in Cary. Meanwhile, in March Google announced plans to bring an engineering hub to Durham with another 1,000 jobs in tow. These and others on top of a 37,000-worker deficit.
Meanwhile, employers are having to deal with immediate personnel needs as they develop strategies for the long term. Mounts said Inmar and others have no choice but to recruit outside of the Triad and even employ remotely to fill short-term needs, the latter providing no benefit to the local economy.
“Every one of these innovation and tech jobs creates five jobs in other areas,” Mounts said. “It creates jobs for accountants and for lawyers and for restaurant workers and other service jobs because tech jobs generate good income. They generate wealth and then that gets distributed through throughout the community. It’s really important that we get this right, because it fuels so many of the other areas of growth and prosperity for our community.”
Tech career pathways
Companies of all sizes are scrambling to fill tech jobs, but not all companies are scrambling. High Point-based Tartigrade Technology, a small IT company that provides cloud migration support and maintenance services for hundreds of companies, works with local schools to introduce technology jobs to students as young as middle school ages.
Tartigrade owner Mike Toman said tech talent doesn’t require a four-year degree. For willing employers, it may not even require two years of post-secondary education. The talent gap, Toman said, can be closed more quickly if companies — and educators — are willing to abandon the traditional talent pipeline: four years of post-secondary education before even looking for work.
As in manufacturing, apprenticeships can provide companies with talent as students work part-time while pursuing related two- and four-year degrees. Toman is involved with Greensboro Apprenticeship Partners, which provides pathways to a variety of advanced manufacturing, mechanical, logistics and tech industries, among others.
Tartigrade Technology is one of the participating employers in the GAP program. The company employs eight, including one senior technician, two junior technicians and three apprentices through GAP. In heavy growth mode, primarily because of the talent gap's impact on client companies, Tartigrade anticipates adding multiple techs over the next year.
“The only thing needed when they come in our door is they need to have an interest in it,” Toman said. “If we can get to them at a young age, they will do well as apprentices because three or four years out of high school, that passion is going to lead them to a great job.”
Toman said connecting with students at an age when they are beginning to think about careers — he knew he wanted to work in IT in his early teens — is essential in filling the talent pipeline. So is dispelling perceptions of the availability of opportunity.
“They don't know that there are 37,000 jobs out there waiting. They think it's a highly competitive market and maybe they should do something in a safer industry,” Toman said. “We let them know this is a great job and there are plenty of opportunities, and it’s only to get bigger.”
Providing the students a channel of communication as they matriculate through high school can also give prospective employers an advantage.
“We have an open door policy where they can call when they have questions about high school tech electives,” Toman said. “We can answer their questions and talk about what kind of career path those electives might lead to.”
A looming ‘sansdemic’
The worker gap, not only in technology jobs, but in virtually every aspect of all industries, is larger than schools not churning out enough qualified graduates.
Rather, the U.S. workforce is shrinking overall because baby boomers are retiring at an increasing rate, and that generation — which focused on wealth-building over reproducing — simply did not replace itself. Whereas boomers grew up in families averaging four children each, they contributed an average of 1.8 offspring.
The ripple effect is being felt through all succeeding generations. According to report titled “The Demographic Drought,” by labor market analytics firm Emsi, the 76 million boomers are leaving behind a generation of roughly half their numbers. With an average household net worth of $1.2 million making it the wealthiest generation in history — and with fewer heirs to leave that wealth to — their children are expecting to inherit estates more or less intact. Many won’t have to work, or at least be as ambitious, as their predecessors.
Emsi calls it a coming sansdemic, both in the U.S. and abroad, which will impact every aspect of quality of life for generations going forward.
“This was already coming, but the pandemic only accelerated it,” Chung said of the workforce shortages. “The biggest culpability here is the baby boomers exiting at a pace where Generation X-ers and millennials are not replacing them at that same rate. That’s a natural structural shortage that is going to start to occur, and immigration restrictions have gotten tighter in recent years, which of course also reduces the amount of available workforce for certain industry sectors.”
From 2014 to 2020, boomer retirements paced at between 1.5 million and 2.2 million. In 2020, that number swelled to 3.5 million as retirement or near retirement-age workers — bolstered by a four-year surge in stock prices that swelled retirement funds — retired earlier than planned.
The building sansdemic is a national issue, which means states and regions will have to be creative in addressing their own workforce challenges. Working in North Carolina’s favor is its population is growing, and Chung said in-migration is to the state’s advantage, providing opportunity continues to follow.
“We are highly dependent on that constant influx of talent moving here from somewhere else,” Chung said. “You get a working age professional to come here with good skills and an education background, and that’s feeding our talent pool. That person brings his or her family here and their kids may end up staying here and working here, and that of course also pays dividends in fueling our talent pool. It's a lot better to be in North Carolina's position where we have such heavy in-migration, than a state where a population is flat or they're actually losing people. Plenty of states that are in that boat right now.”
The 2020 National Movers Study ranked North Carolina No. 6 in the country for inbound migration, ranking behind Idaho, South Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota and Arizona, respectively. In addition, taxfoundation.org ranked North Carolina No. 10 in its 2021 business tax climate study, which cited logistics access, a location central to two-thirds of the nation’s population and quality of life as among chief reasons companies expand or relocate.
Those, and an available, reliable talent pool.
The latter, Mounts said, is where the Triad can hold a competitive advantage among tech employers, but only if it starts now.
“It’s a problem, but it's also a huge opportunity for us,” he said. “If we are one of the areas to go after this and get this right, people will be talking about Winston-Salem and Greensboro as the growth area of North Carolina whereas today they talk generally about Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte.
“We have an opportunity to move quickly in our community to shore this up, but it's going to take people in the education institutions to be more flexible and modular in their programming. It's going to take industry working closely with the educators to create opportunities. It’s going to take much more focus on getting students engaged and excited about the opportunities that are waiting for them.”
