Honeywell, a Fortune 100 commercial and consumer products and engineering multi-national conglomerate, will relocate its global headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina, in Mecklenberg County, creating 750 new jobs by the end of 2024. The company’s move will include relocating approximately 150 jobs from New Jersey and will bring more than $248 million in investment by the end of 2023.
“With our strong talent, robust infrastructure and unmatched quality of life, including our commitment to education and our low cost of living, North Carolina is the ideal headquarters choice for an elite company like Honeywell,” said Governor Roy Cooper. “Charlotte is perfectly positioned to provide the education and training, infrastructure and amenities to attract and retain Honeywell’s top talent.”
The pending merger of BB&T and SunTrust makes another Fortune 500 company that soon will call Charlotte its headquarters, reinforcing fintech dominance and expanding the ecosystem in the market. With a combination of banks, fintech startups and concentration of fintech talent, this pending merger underscores the attractiveness of the Queen City as one of the hottest technology talent markets in the U.S. It is:
- On top of the CompTIA Tech Town Index 2018
- The fastest growing of 50 tech talent markets, increasing by 59% in five year (2012-2017), as reported by CBRE
- Ranked as the 20th Best Place to Live and the 34th Best Place to Retire according to U.S. News with an overall score of 7.0 on a scale of 1 to 10
- Ranked #54 for overall education of current workforce according to WalletHub
These accolades are impressive—and Charlotte and the greater North Carolina economy saw steady growth in 2018 and are on track to become a major tech hub with 10.3% compounded annual growth in its tech workforce since 2012, according to Forrester Research.
Emerging Technologies to Spark Demand for Talent
In the tech sector, demand for emerging technologies such as “artificial intelligence, the internet of things, blockchain and cybersecurity skills will exceed the supply of workers creating a shortage of 900,000 highly compensation jobs” by 2022, writes Wall St. Journal Reporter Gary Beach in his blog.
To close the workforce gap, it will take strong collaboration between corporate America and our education system. But, in the short-term, that will require creative approaches and investment to increase workforce capacity. We won’t be able to settle for anything less.
Fintech Attracts New Talent
The business community in Charlotte is not sitting back. As part of a larger community and ecosystem, organizations such as Carolina Fintech Hub is bringing together corporations to affect change and working towards a common goal of attracting new talent to the market in addition to cultivating and elevating existing talent. Each day, the region adds 127 new residents daily (97 movers and 30 births), according to the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance.
“The Charlotte IT market is experiencing growth and competition,” said Tara Wyborny, Director of Junior Talent Programs at Genesis10. Demand for software developers in the state leads the way surging 69% from January 2018 to more than 6,000 open roles in January 2019, according to a recent North Carolina Technology Association Tech Talent Trends Alert. Hottest skills in demand are Java at more than 5,000 and software development, also topping 5,000.
Staffing companies and consulting firms alike are looking at talent pools through a different lens — by bringing back retirees, training to upskill or reskill, tapping returning military veterans or developing junior talent — to increase the workforce in the short term.
“The good news is the attractiveness of living and raising a family in Charlotte”, according to Tripp Guin, Founding Partner of TRIPP Commercial, a Global Corporate Brokerage Services Firm. Guin shared that there is an overall uptick in commercial real estate and his conversations with buyers on the region’s attractiveness--affordable homes, low cost of living relative to other markets, three hours from the beach, two hours from the mountains and outstanding college and universities. “Increasingly we are seeing more families relocate from markets like New York or the West Coast because they get a little of everything here in Charlotte,” he said.
In February 2018, Genesis10 launched an intensive program that trains a select group of STEM graduates in Java and Python programming, which are foundational competencies key to supporting emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial Intelligence and others. Initially piloted in the Twin Cities, the Dev10 Software Developer training program has since been expanded to Charlotte and Dallas.
Genesis10's Dev10 Program Trains Developers
Highlighting the rigor in the candidate evaluation process, just 2% of the candidates who applied for a recent Dev10 class were selected. Before completing the program, many in that class received job offers from leading companies across industries. Now the Dev10 consultants work as Front-End Web Developers, Full Stack Java Developers and in Application Support in Financial Services, Manufacturing and Retail.
Take Nancy, for example. She has a degree in mathematics with a minor in computer science and had worked as an anti-money laundering analyst. “What interested me about the program is the nontraditional way the company hires consultants for it, training and helping them to get a job in the real world,” she said. “All the job ads I saw on social medial ask for several years of experience, which as a recent college grad I did not have.” Today, Nancy works as a Java Developer, running code every day for a financial services firm.
Focusing training on Java allows Genesis10 to build a workforce with a skill set that is highly in demand in Charlotte, commented Eric Roberge, Vice President of Operations and Charlotte Office Leader at Genesis10. Wyborny added, “We are supporting our clients’ needs as they embrace emerging technology and creating a talent pool that otherwise is quite limited. Given the tight employment market for technology workers in Charlotte, Dev10 presents our clients with a local alternative to costly senior developers or offshore resources.”
Not only is this program investing in junior talent to build capabilities, but it is focused on retaining the talent in Charlotte to contribute to the thriving local economy.
Learn about Genesis10's Dev10 Program.
Read the Then & Now stories of Genesis10's Dev10 Consultants.
