Chicago Tops The List of 'Future Tech Hotspots' In New Survey

By Austin Brown in News on Sep 9, 2016 3:00PM

If recent headlines about shrinkage in Chicago or the upcoming sports season have got you questioning the Windy City's dominance, fear not—this random tech survey gives us some tech sector bragging rights.

In a survey conducted by Modis, a Jacksonville-based tech staffing agency, more than half (51 percent) of the 500 "IT decision-makers" surveyed chose Chicago as a future tech hotspot, a few points more than Houston, which came second at 47 percent, and Boston, which came third with 43 percent.

This doesn't mean Chicago's necessarily winning out, per se—with the respondents able to choose multiple cities in the survey, it's more of a "share the wealth" situation. But deeper in the data, the nitty-gritty details show Chicago as a winner where it counts: younger IT professionals, women, "millennials," and those with professional degrees all tended to choose Chicago, with the latter especially putting their money on Chicago by an overwhelming majority (73 percent!). For Chicago pulls ahead as the city with the highest likelihood of becoming a tech hotspot for women and for people ages 26 to 34 years old.

Someone forward this to Rahm—he could probably use some good news this year.

[H/T Crains]