The tech industry’s hiring slowdown isn’t stopping the rising tide of technical talent, but it is creating a window of opportunity for other industries to lure in that talent, CBRE’s 2023 Scoring Tech Talent report indicates.

Tech workers in the US have increased by 610,000 (11.4%) since 2020, CBRE found. As belts tighten at tech companies, those numbers are good news for other industries, many of which are seeing an increased need for high-skilled technologists, Colin Yasukochi, who leads the commercial real estate company’s Tech Insights Center, told Tech Brew.

“The tech companies have been able to compete for the best and the brightest because they have the ability to pay the highest compensation,” Yasukochi said. “But with this little bit of a pullback, it’s created opportunities for non-tech companies to acquire some of that talent, and especially people coming out of college who don’t yet have a job.”

When Big Tech began to grow beyond the Bay Area and Seattle in the early 2010s, tech companies started to expand into regions producing graduates with tech degrees, he explained.

That’s how cities like New York, DC, and Austin, to name a few, ended up becoming their own tech hubs.

But now, there’s a geographic tightening happening, too. “With the economic difficulties that we’re experiencing…they’re re-concentrating their core tech talent in their key locations,” Yasukochi said.

Mapping tech talent

CBRE’s tech hub scorecard uses 13 metrics to measure the “competitive advantages” of 75 North American markets and their “ability to attract and grow tech talent pools.”

Workforce metrics including size, concentration, and growth are given the most weight, while less is given to metrics like R&D spending on tech, tech job growth forecast, and office rent cost.

The top five tech markets—the San Francisco Bay Area; Seattle; New York Metro; Washington, DC; and Toronto—stayed the same as last year, though New York moved up in the rankings while Toronto moved down, the report said.

Despite the seemingly constant headlines ringing alarm bells for San Francisco’s future, there hasn’t been a significant decline in the city’s tech score, Yasukochi said. That’s in part because 75% of tech layoffs affected non-tech workers, he added.

“It’s still a region that the top quality talent around the globe really wants to be, because the most exciting things in technology are happening here,” he said, pointing in particular to advancements in AI. “The Bay Area has the largest workforce of artificial intelligence talent, and it’s also receiving by far the highest amount of funding related to AI companies.”

On top of that, non-tech companies are expanding their presences in the Bay Area in order to gain access to its top-tier tech talent, Yasukochi said.

While the tech worker pipeline is becoming increasingly diverse—25.3% of tech graduates in 2021 belonged to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (compared to 22.2% in the wider tech workforce) and 26.1% were female, compared with 24.3% in the existing workforce—the Bay Area still lands third on CBRE’s list of least diverse markets.