Research, engineering and test jobs have seen nearly 3% annual growth since 2010.
Jobs in the technology sector saw solid growth last year, according to a new report by industry group CompTIA – and jobs in engineering, research and testing have been growing steadily at almost 3% year-over-year.
The Cyberstates report looked at various sectors of the technology industry on both a national and a state-by-state basis. Among the findings:
-6.9 million workers are employed in the U.S. tech sector, with an additional 7.3 million tech jobs distributed across various other industries. The largest single subsector within tech was classified by CompTIA as IT and custom software services, with nearly 2.4 million jobs in that area and year-over-year growth of 4.8%. The second-largest tech subsector was engineering, research and testing with about 1.7 million employed and year-over-year growth of 1.9%. CompTIA reported that between 2010 to 2016, the engineering, research and testing sector has been growing at a rate of 2.7% and added nearly 33,000 jobs last year alone. However, average wages in engineering, research and testing dropped from $107,500 to $104,100 last year.
-The tech industry added more than 180,000 net new jobs last year, CompTIA found, and the group also noted that as of the fourth quarter of 2016, there were almost 630,000 job openings in the tech sector.
-California employs the most tech-sector employees: nearly 1.2 million in 2016, accounting for 24% of the national tech sector payroll and 17% of tech sector workers, according to CompTIA. States with fast-growing tech sectors in 2016 included Utah (6% growth year-over-year), North Carolina (5.9%), Michigan (5.1%) and Montana (4.5%).
Read the full report here.(pdf)
In other test news:
–Ixia is expanding its CloudLens “visibility as a service” offerings to public cloud services, starting with Amazon Web Services. The new CloudLens Public – which is itself “serverless” and cloud-based – is designed to allow customers to “capture and filter data in the public cloud,” according to Ixia, and the software platform relies on a web interface for management. Ixia said the offering filters packet data at each source instance in order to avoid the risk that an inline virtual packet broker becomes a single point of failure within a network.
After initially starting with AWS, Ixia expects to add support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the second half of this year.
–Teledyne LeCroy launched four high-definition oscilloscope lines with bandwidth ranges between 200 megahertz to one gigahertz and features including gesture control and updated, more powerful PC systems. The company also introduced a “value-priced” oscilloscope option, the WaveSurfer 510, with one-gigahertz bandwidth.
-Norwegian company Polewall said this week it successfully tested 200 gigabit per second link speeds using optical wireless transport that utilizes infrared light to carry signals. The company has a commercialized solution for 1 Gbps backhaul for small cells and/or future 5G systems, and says its systems are “capable of transmitting both front- and backhaul traffic across distances up to 250 meters at fiber-like speed.”
Polewall founder and CEO Jan Eide said in a statement that to achieve the 200 Gbps test, Polewall “ran 100 Gbps at 1,310 [nanometers] and 100 Gbps at 1,550 nm combined over the same link at the same time. We measured the results with two 100 Gbps test sets and are very pleased with the results, which were error free.”
–Pasternack launched six IQ mixers with a range up to 38 GHz and a new line of low phase noise amplifiers that can be used in test equipment; as well as new cables for use with vector network analyzers.
-Wireless test bed company OctoScope launched a compact test chamber with 16 radio frequency connectors for over-the-air testing designed to support advanced multiple-input/multiple-output antenna technology, as well as wireless mesh and internet of things scenarios. The rack-mountable OctoBox is 18-inches wide by 12-inches high by 29-inches deep and stackable so multiple devices can be tested while providing an isolated RF environment for each one.
Image copyright: lightwise / 123RF Stock Photo
