Demand for tech-focused jobs in the St. Louis area grew by a modest 1.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to an annual report released this week by TechSTL, the local tech council.

The report measures the number of job postings in the past year for 55 tech occupations, which totaled 39,432 for the St. Louis region.

These numbers are different from labor market statistics on employment, which can lag by several months, said TechSTL Executive Director Emily Hemingway. The number of job postings can telegraph the demand companies have for specific tech occupations, she said.

“The trends we’re able to put out in this report are incredibly valuable because they are the emerging trends,” Hemingway said. “They’re allowing our employers to really tell us where the market is going. How is their demand [for certain roles] changing based upon the changing of technology?”

This kind of data can help TechSTL and other entities identify which kinds of training opportunities must be developed to keep pace with what employers are seeking, she added.

The slight uptick in job postings from 2023 to 2024 follows a precipitous drop in tech job postings from 2022 to 2023 and is a reason to be optimistic, said Hemingway. Between November and December last year, St. Louis was sixth in the country for new job listings, she added.

“By comparison, we’re actually doing pretty good,” Hemingway said. “We’re on par with what the rest of the country is seeing.”

This year’s report identified “business operations specialists, all other” as having the most job postings at 4,878 and the highest growth of postings at 122%.

“This is a really broad category of jobs, which means that we’re seeing the categories of positions that are blurring,” Hemingway said. “Employers are kind of putting it under this bucket, which is why it’s growing so rapidly.”

To Hemingway, business operations specialists can encompass many roles, including project managers, analysts, marketing managers or customer success managers.

“It’s folks that are playing this frontline role, but also the human side of operations,” she said.

While postings for computer and information systems managers and software developers shrank between 2023 and 2024, they still both had the second- and third-most job openings in the region, respectively.

“A lot of our larger employers, that is still our largest occupational footprint,” Hemingway said.

The other detail Hemingway points to in this year’s report is that almost all jobs in the U.S. now require some level of digital proficiency. It’s something Cortex President and CEO Sam Fiorello sees too.

“We’re going to have to all be prepared for a world which requires lifelong learning,” he said. “It’s no longer K through 8, K through 12; it’s K through 67 when you’re retired, you’re going to be a learner.”

St. Louis leaders have been considering this reality for a few years and have sought to establish new pipelines of tech talent outside universities.

“We have been working in coalition to try and figure out how to get more people, atypical tech talent, into tech jobs,” Fiorello said. “Frankly, it’s been a moving target, because companies are really trying to define their needs.”

He points to the example of an initiative from a few years ago with a group of chief internet security officers to shore up the number of quality cybersecurity workers in the St. Louis region.

“We thought we could train them up, have a 15-week certificate, they come in-house and get a cyber job,” Fiorello said. “What we learned is that more likely [there’s] a path where a company hires them in a basic IT or tech job and they will, in-house over the next year [train them] and put them in place.”

On the part of TechSTL, Hemingway said the organization is also launching a monthslong economic research study to identify what St. Louis needs to do to support future workforce needs.

“When we’re looking at AI, digital transformation, at digital literacy, really understanding how are the career pathways evolving in our education and workforce development network,” she said.

The rise of artificial intelligence is helping to drive initiatives on a global scale to help people be ready to effectively use it, she added.

“Every job is becoming a tech job, and that workforce regardless of the industry is now having to really meet that demand,” Hemingway said. “We’re talking about basic digital proficiency and digital skills, that is the future of strong workforce and economic competitiveness.”