With all the talk about remote work in the last couple of months, we wanted to share our own perspective on the #remotework trend. We are publishing a series of blog posts around how the following factors drive and affect going remote:
- Professions
- Companies
- City Infrastructure
This first post will be on factor number 1 — Professions
We at BeyondHQ are huge fans of CityLab. They deliver incredible reporting on the present, past, and future of cities around the world, and have consistently put out engaging insights and narratives with beautiful visuals. One topic that caught our attention is their coverage of The Creative Class in America. We fundamentally believe that opportunities for innovation, jobs, and social progress exist across America, and not just along the coasts. So when CityLab published the rise of The Creative Class across American cities, identifying cities with the fastest growing rates for The Creative Class, we couldn’t resist diving in further. In this post, we attempt to highlight a few more characteristics of these cities, using the 50+ metrics we collect on talent availability, population, and geography.
Why the focus on The Creative Class? Because we believe that many of these professions are conducive to remote work. These jobs enable opportunity regardless of geography. Understanding their geographic distribution furthers our collective ability to build a more inclusive, nurturing and flexible future of work.
Upon first glance, you can see that some might seem obvious, while others are a pleasant surprise.
We first start off with population statistics for these cities, so as to get a sense of their relative size.
Note that traditional hubs like SF and NYC didn’t make the cut.
Next up, we looked at the relative geographical location of these cities on a map. Everything comes alive just a little bit more when seen on a map :)
You can see that many of the cities are on Eastern time. We’re wondering what deeper insights might be lurking here :)
We then went a little deeper. What specific job titles constitute the creative class? CityLab defines the group as “…science and tech; arts, culture, media and entertainment; business and management; and healthcare and education.”
We decided to look at workforce availability in CityLab’s top cities across 3 types of professions: marketing, web development/design, and data science
Unsurprisingly, Seattle has the most employees in these professions. Baltimore is catching up on data scientists though!
Finally, what do salaries look like in these markets?
If you’re a data scientist who loves gambling, Las Vegas beckons you for more reasons than one :)
Conclusion
There you have it — some of the fastest growing ‘Creative Class’ cities as identified by CityLab, and as explored just a little bit further by BeyondHQ. We will continue to post more insights on cities and related remote work trends, so please check back! Have your own insights and narrative to add? Please reach out and we’d love to work together to showcase this great nation and its growing evolution toward greater adoption of flexible work.
