Cyberstates 2021: The Definitive Guide To The U.S. Tech Industry And Tech Workforce

The tech workforce consists of two primary components, represented as a single figure by the ‘net tech employment’ designation. The foundation is the set of technology professionals working in technical positions, such as IT support, network engineering, software development, data scientist, and related roles. Many of these professionals work for technology companies (46.5 percent), but many others are employed by organizations across every industry sector in the U.S. economy (53.5 percent).

The second component consists of the business professionals employed by technology companies. These professionals – encompassing sales, marketing, finance, HR, operations and management, play an important role in supporting the development and delivery of the technology products and services used throughout the economy. Slightly more than 34 percent of the net tech-employment total consists of tech industry business professionals.

One final segment involves workers classified as self-employed. For the purposes of this report, only dedicated, full-time self-employed technology workers are counted towards net tech employment. Workers that are characterized as “gig” workers, which may entail working on the side for supplementary income, are excluded from this analysis due to several uncertainties with the data and to minimize the possibility of double counting.