Employment in Hawaii’s tech industry was ranked 45th in the country, with 15,199 workers in 2015, according to the Cyberstates 2016 report from non-profit tech association CompTIA. The report provides a state-by-state analysis of the U.S. technology job market.
Those employees had an annual average salary of $79,318, which was 85 percent more than the average private sector wage in Hawaii. That means a tech payroll of $1.2 billion in 2015, accounting for 2.9 percent of all private sector payroll in the state, and ranking Hawaii 33rd nationwide on the salary front.
Altogether, Hawaii’s tech industry accounts for 2.7 percent of the state economy, CompTIA concludes.
Nationally, the technology industry continues to be a major driving force in the economy, making up approximately 7.1 percent of the overall GDP and 11.6 percent of the total private sector payroll. In 2015, the technology industry added nearly 200,000 net jobs and now employs more than 6.7 million people.
“As with any sector-level report, there are varying interpretations of what constitutes the tech sector and the tech workforce,” CompTIA notes. “For the purposes of this report, CompTIA focuses on [a] more narrowly defined technology subset.”
CompTIA’s senior vice president of research and market insights Tim Herbert provided an in-depth overview of this year’s Cyberstates report: