It’s no secret Atlanta has some of the best tech talent around — Georgia Tech grads are coveted by Silicon Valley, Morehouse recently landed a partnership with JP Morgan to grow tech entrepreneurs, and GSU, Emory, and other city schools’ entrepreneurship programs are top-notch. That’s been cemented in CBRE’s latest Scoring Tech Talent Report, where Atlanta moved up four spots to land at #5.
Though San Francisco did hold steady at #1, Raleigh-Durham also came in strong at #7.
The rankings for the Tech Talent Scorecard are determined based on 13 metrics including tech talent supply, growth, concentration, cost, completed tech degrees, industry outlook for job growth, and market outlook for office and apartment rent cost growth. Compared to other cities on the list like San Francisco, New York City, and Washington DC, Atlanta’s cost of living is far lower.
Additional insights in the report include:
- More tech talent, more tech jobs: Atlanta was the #3 largest market by percent change for tech labor growth with a growth rate of 47.6 percent. The city has seen a 30 percent increase in tech degree completions since 2011. In that same period, Atlanta added 43,000 tech jobs.
- Increase in millennial residents: Atlanta saw the fifth-highest increase of millennials — a 9.3 percent increase since 2010.
- Tech jobs are paying more: Atlanta saw the eighth highest increase in tech wages (15.7 percent) from 2011 to 2016.
“As demonstrated by this report, Atlanta is a tech talent and education rich city,” says Christian Devlin, CBRE’s Atlanta Tech & Media Practice leader. “Atlanta is producing more tech jobs than people with tech degrees, strengthening the case for talent to remain here instead of seeking jobs elsewhere.”
“One of the other factors worth highlighting is the increasing interaction between Atlanta’s large corporates and the tech and startup communities,” says Devlin. “While we have already seen incredible growth in Atlanta’s tech sector, the combination of trends like this along with Atlanta’s strong and growing tech talent based suggest that Atlanta may well still be in the early stages of its rise as a prominent tech city, and that we likely have some very exciting things ahead of us in the coming years.”
View the full report here.
