Today let’s take a look at markets around the country with high percentages of Financial and Technology employment.  For the purposes of calculating Financial and Technology employment in a given market, we lump together the employment in the Information and Financial Activities supersectors reported by the BLS. 

Why track these employees?  These are typically more highly trained, more steadily employed individuals, with incomes above the median in a community.  Interestingly, both the Information supersector as well as the Financial Activities supersector has shown losses in employment during the past three quarters.  The losses in the Financial Activities supersector are quite simple to make sense of given the overt troubles in the financial sector and the impressive layoffs by many of the major banking systems.  The Financial Activities supersector also includes those employed in real estate related activities; we have not tracked specifically the reduction in the real estate agent numbers across the country, but our impression from reading reports issued by those in the field is that real estate agent attrition during the downturn has been significant. 

Here are the markets with the highest percentages of total employees employed in Financial and Technology jobs.  The market average for this category in our database is 7.6%, the median 7.1%.  Note that the values reported represent a 6 month rolling average of the data. 

1.  Des Moines, IA  18.9%
2.  Missoula, MT  17.8%
3.  Biloxi, MS   16.1%
4.  Columbia, MO  15.7%
5.  Sioux Falls, SD  14.9%

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the markets with the lowest Financial and Technology employment levels in the country. 

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