There’s been a lot of talk about a mass exodus from well-known tech cities, with talented workers and entrepreneurs ditching San Francisco’s sky-high rents and fleeing New York City’s shoebox apartments. Regardless of whether the COVID-19 pandemic will actually bring the demise of these cities, there is one tech hub that has only continued its upward streak over the past several months: Northern Virginia (also known as NOVA), the region just outside of Washington, D.C.
Home to tenacious tech
While millions of jobs nationwide were wiped during the pandemic, NOVA’s tech ecosystem has continued to grow. According to Dice’s Q2 Tech Job Report, tech job postings in Virginia rose 11% compared to the second quarter of 2019, while the other top states — California, Texas and New York — saw downward turns. Plus, out of the top 10 tech employers by number of job postings, three were headquartered in Northern Virginia (Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Leidos), and all 10 have locations in the region. With thousands of current job postings for tech positions across NOVA, the area’s hiring trajectory doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.
The demand for talent in NOVA is real. Most famously, Amazon needs to fill over 25,000 high-tech jobs in the region with the arrival of HQ2, but other big names have followed. Microsoft, for instance, will need to recruit some 1,500 NOVA-based workers for its new $64 million software development hub in Reston, a deal sealed mid-pandemic. If a small company is more your speed, local tech firms have been actively hiring during COVID, too, such as low-code automation company Appian with its roster of innovative solutions for a safe return to the workplace; and leading IT Operations Management company ScienceLogic, transforming how IT teams tackle service-disrupting events at a time when we depend more than ever on our technology functioning seamlessly.
Why tech companies are choosing NOVA…
If you’re wondering how Northern Virginia became a magnet for tech companies (15,600 of them) in the first place, the answer is because the region is a magnet for their employees. Earlier this year, CBRE ranked the Washington, D.C. area the #2 best market for tech talent in North America. Companies come to NOVA for the people — highly-skilled workers, but also human beings that care about making a real difference in the world: neighboring D.C. is ranked the most socially-conscious and the fourth-greenest city in America, and Virginia is the fourth most politically-engaged state in the country.
For these reasons and more, tech companies are looking to staff up in NOVA by the thousands, in fields ranging from cybersecurity and software to data analytics and cloud computing. But besides the jobs, what about this region is attracting talented people?
