Useful Stats: Employment in S&E Occupations by Metropolitan Area in 2006

Using its Occupational Employment Statistics Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the number of employees in about 800 separate occupations for every metropolitan area in the U.S. In the most recent version of its Science and Engineering Indicators series, the National Science Board compiled a chart organizing the number of employees in S&E occupations in 2006, the most recent data available. As a whole, science and engineering occupations include all varieties of engineers, as well as scientists from the computer, mathematical, life, physical and social sciences.

 

SSTI has prepared a table showing the number of S&E employees and the percent of employees in S&E occupations for the 100 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest number of employed people. For the U.S. as a whole, in 2006, just over 5.4 million had jobs in S&E occupations, which represents 4.1 percent of the working population. In the table, the metropolitan areas are organized by the size of their total employee base.

 

The metropolitan area with the highest concentration of S&E employees was San Jose, whose 126,000 S&E employees make up 14.1 percent of the total. The Durham, N.C., and Washington, D.C., metros were the only other two with concentrations greater than 10 percent. Other areas with high concentrations included the metros centered at Austin (7.9 percent), Seattle (7.8 percent), Boston (7.4 percent), Colorado Springs (7.0 percent), Madison (6.9 percent), Raleigh (6.9 percent), and San Francisco (6.9 percent). Within this list of the 100 largest, data were not available for the New York City (NY-NJ-PA) and Poughkeepsie (NY) metro areas.

 

SSTI's table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/022008t.htm

 

Appendix Table 3-6 in Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, “Employment and earnings in S&E occupations and non-S&E occupations,“ includes this S&E employee data for all metropolitan areas in the U.S. and can be found at: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf/at03.pdf