George Nemeth · CIO.com names CLE one of the Worst U.S. Cities to Work in IT

June 23rd, 2009

The Worst U.S. Cities to Work in IT – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership.

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Category: Economic Development, Tech
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3 Responses to “CIO.com names CLE one of the Worst U.S. Cities to Work in IT”

  1. Ed Morrison Says:
    June 23rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    Of course, this posting brings to mind what NorTech has been up to.

    The foundations have been pumping a ton of money into this organization. But it’s hard to figure out what it is doing.

    Here’s the NorTech “strategy” report: http://snurl.com/kqydp (Hard to figure what this is all about)

    Here’s the NorTech “action plan” for 2006: http://snurl.com/kqz03 (a lot of “actions” but, it appears, little delivery.)

    Then, there’s the NEO Tech Jobs idea that apparently didn’t work: http://www.neotechjobs.com/
    (even though it’s still listed on the NorTech site). Launched in 2007, the site now directs to a Ohio jobs site.

    You can get some background on this NEO Tech Job initiative here:
    http://www.neotechjobs.com/partners.html
    and here:
    http://www.neotechjobs.com/about.html

    About the same time NorTech released a report on the IT workforce in the region.
    http://snurl.com/kr1gy

    That report concluded, in part: “The system of higher education is not producing enough graduates to keep pace with employer demand for professional workers.”

    More recently. NorTech released an optimistic report on the region’s high tech economy: http://snurl.com/kr27p

  2. bradnellis Says:
    June 25th, 2009 at 9:30 am

    It’s certainly unfortunate to be ranked among the last in anything. Doubly so for IT, from NEOSA’s perspective at least. While the CIO.com article was reasonably accurate with respect to foreclosures, it was way off in IT jobs. I doubt the author’s cursory research on dice.com was extensicve, though it was probably consistent across the city’s compared.

    A quick search on the Ohio Means Jobs site (www.ohimeansjobs.com), yields 1000 openings using the phrase “information technology” and 853 jobs using “software development”. Clearly, we’ve got a lot of opportunity for IT professionals to start and advance their career in this region.

  3. Rick Pollack Says:
    June 25th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

    Brad – I went to Ohio Means Jobs and tried out your search. If you enter the phrase Information Technology in quotes the number of openings drops to 404 results. If you dig into those 404 results you will find:

    - offers for technical training
    - account executive, part-time market research, and receptionist positions
    - CTO, CIO and VP listings that are really just trolling for resumes – there is no specific position accompanying the post
    - Approx. 150 of the 404 results are a month old (or older)
    - many of the posts are from consulting companies – which means the position may not really exist (resume trolling is a common practice)

    Of the 1,000 Information Technology jobs MAYBE 200 are real. Put Software Development in quotes and it drops to 267…

    There are technical positions available but “clearly we’ve got a lot of opportunity” is not accurate. I think the software/Internet job postings on Craigslist provide a more realistic picture.