On a dollar basis, Rhode Island saw the largest annual growth in technology-job wages of any state nationwide from 2005 to 2006, according to a new report from the nation’s largest high-tech trade association.
The Ocean State’s average, inflation-adjusted, high-tech salary grew by $4,700 over that time to $75,233, the 17th-highest technology wage nationwide at the beginning of 2006, according to the American Electronics Association (AeA). Massachusetts’ average tech wage that year was $94,800, second only to California’s $101,200.
High-tech salaries in Rhode Island rose faster, increasing 6.7 percent from 2005 to 2006 – the nation’s second-fastest growth rate, after Wyoming’s 7.3 percent, the trade group said in its 11th annual Cyberstates report released last week.
But another statistic tempered the good news for the Ocean State’s high-tech industry: Rhode Island was among 16 states that saw venture capital investments in high-tech decline in 2007, the AeA said.
Venture capital investment in Rhode Island declined by $107 million – the nation’s third-worst plunge, after only New Jersey, which saw a decline of $132 million from 2006 to 2007, and Alaska, which experienced no venture capital investments in 2006 and 2007 – the AeA found, based on data from the National Venture Capital Association. (Initial public offerings nationwide fell to a nearly five-year low in the first quarter of 2008, as the credit crunch and stock market slump discouraged investors, the NVCA said last week in a separate report. The AeA report amounted to a snapshot of the national and Rhode Island high-tech industry. Among other local highlights, it said:
• Forty-six of every 1,000 private-sector workers in Rhode Island were employed by high-tech firms in 2006.
• Rhode Island had 19,332 high-tech workers in 2006 – 42nd in the nation.
• High-tech jobs in the state provided $1.5 billion in payroll in 2006.
• The state’s average high-tech salary of $75,233 in 2006 was 94-percent higher than the state’s overall average private sector wage of $38,732 that year.
Each year, the AeA publishes its comprehensive Cyberstates report to document national and state trends in high-tech employment, wages and other economic factors.
The latest edition – Cyberstates 2008: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry – shows that the high-tech industry continued to grow in 2007, adding 91,400 net jobs nationwide for a U.S. total of 5.9 million. That follows job gains of 139,000 in 2006 and 87,400 in 2005.
But, said Christopher Hansen, president and CEO of the AeA, “while we are certainly pleased to report that the technology industry added jobs nationally and across nearly every state, national tech growth slowed in 2007, making the story good but not great.”
High-tech wages in every state continued to significantly exceed overall private-sector wages, the report said. In 2006, tech workers in California earned on average 112 percent more than the state’s private-sector work force – $101,200 compared with $47,800, the AeA found. Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Colorado rounded out the top five states with largest differentials between high-tech and private-sector average wages.
“Tech jobs make critical contributions to the U.S. economy in terms of innovation, and pay extremely well … 87-percent better than the average private-sector wage,” Hansen said. •
