Useful Stats: Defining High Tech Employment

What constitutes high tech employment? Through aggressive marketing of its annual reports, the AEA, formerly known as the American Electronic Association, has captured most of the media's attention around the country. While a very good report, AEA's Cyberstates only reports employment in its member industries, which represents just one-third of the nation's industrial R&D. The result is, when many people think of high tech, they only think of information and communication technologies (ICT).

Obviously, high tech is more than ICT. Researchers in aerospace or the biosciences — to name two fields excluded in the AEA analysis — will point that out. Having the highest concentration of automotive research and researchers in the country, Michigan promoters also are quick to take issue with the annual AEA survey. As a result, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) recently released a study presenting a more comprehensive review of different technology employment figures across the country, which compares the results to the figures reported in Cyberstates.

Conducted by the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) at the Altarum Institute, Michigan: The High-Technology Automotive State concludes that a more complete definition of high tech includes the 29 industry groups identified by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for calculating the total number of high-tech workers by state. The BLS researchers define industries as “high tech” if the percentage of the industry’s workforce in both research and development and technology-oriented jobs was twice the overall U.S. industry average.

While the emphasis is on Michigan's position nationally, the MEDC study includes several tables presenting tech employment figures for all 50 states and a discussion of potential limitations of relying on Cyberstates to characterize a state's tech activity. Michigan is ranked fourth in the U.S. for total employment in high-tech industries, the findings show, and the state has more than 568,000 high-tech workers — a gain of more than 38,000 high-tech workers since the study was first completed about two years ago. For comparison, Michigan was ranked 17th in the 2002 Cyberstates survey with 110,050 high-tech workers, a significantly lesser figure. MEDC reports the automotive industry alone employs more than 70,000 high-tech workers in Michigan.

Using the 2001 BLS high tech employment compiled in Michigan: The High-Technology Automotive State and total 2001 employment, SSTI has prepared a table presenting high-tech's share of employment in all 50 states. The table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/120602t.htm

Michigan: The High-Technology Automotive State is available at http://medc.michigan.org/news/reports/economic/.

The first-ever mid-year update of Cyberstates is available for purchase from http://www.aeanet.org.