Pittsburgh tech industry growing, report says

A new report from the Pittsburgh Technology Council has found that the technology industry in Pennsylvania has been growing for the past three years.

The State of the Industry Report compares three years of data, from 2019 to 2021, from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry for six main technology industry clusters: information technology, life sciences, environmental technology, energy technology, advanced manufacturing and advanced materials.

When looking just at the 13 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, most of the technology industry clusters in the region saw positive growth in annual payroll, the report found, with the exception of manufacturing and energy. Information technology led the way, the report said, gaining 19 percent over the three-year period. Life sciences had the second-highest payroll growth at 11 percent.

The study noted that one part of the life sciences cluster, health services, had the largest annual payroll at $8.2 billion, and the highest number of employees at more than 103,000.

The report also found that the region had 11,258 technology establishments in 2021, more than 15 percent of the total companies in the region. The technology firms had more than 295,000 workers on their payrolls – nearly a quarter (24 percent) of the region’s total workforce – and paid out $27.2 billion in annual wages, more than a third (36 percent) of the region’s total wages in 2021.

While all of the subclusters saw wage growth, the number of jobs in the subcluster shrunk. For example, in 2021 the IT subcluster employed over 29,000 workers in the region, which equates to a decline in employment of 3.8 percent over the three-year period between 2019-2021. However, the aggregated IT industry cluster had the highest percentage growth in total annual payroll of any in the report, as measured over the three-year period between 2019 and 2021. The average annual wage for the IT industry cluster in 13 counties was $128,642 in 2021.

The advanced manufacturing cluster posted the largest workforce decline, a loss of 3,856 workers from 2019 to 2021, a 5.8 percent shrinkage. In life science, the workforce grew by 2.8 percent between 2019 and 2021, the only subcluster that didn’t see a decline.