SAN JOSE — San Jose is adding jobs at a solid pace, but employment growth in the region’s largest city lags behind the pace of gains in both the Bay Area and Santa Clara County.
Economic development officials in San Jose reported Tuesday that the city’s job gains totaled 2.6 percent in 2015. In contrast, the Bay Area expanded its job base by 3.8 percent in 2015, while Santa Clara County saw growth of 4.2 percent, according to figures from the state’s Employment Development Department.
The East Bay’s job base expanded by 2.8 percent in 2015, while total payroll jobs in the San Francisco-San Mateo region grew by 4.4 percent.
“Our job base in San Jose is much more evenly distributed across industry sectors than you see in Cupertino, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View,” said Michelle Thong of the city’s Office of Economic Development.
During 2015, San Jose added 10,370 nonfarm payroll jobs, according to the city report. Santa Clara County added 42,500 jobs over the same one-year period, the EDD figures show. That means the cities and unincorporated areas outside of San Jose added 32,100 jobs during 2015. More than half of the county’s residents live in San Jose.
The tech employment dynamics could begin to shift in San Jose. Case in point: Apple has committed to building a vast campus in North San Jose that could employ thousands of people and rival the tech firm’s “spaceship” campus under construction in Cupertino.
“San Jose is attracting more tech jobs,” Thong said.
In 2015, San Jose had 92,000 technology jobs. That was an increase of 7 percent over the 86,000 tech jobs San Jose had in 2014, according to the city’s estimates.
“It’s great to see the growth in tech in San Jose,” Thong said, pointing to the presence of long-time stalwarts such as Adobe Systems in the city’s downtown, and up-and-coming firms such as Xactly and Intacct, also in the central business district.
Some sectors within San Jose’s tech industry were particularly robust, the city said.
In 2015, jobs in San Jose’s information industry grew 10 percent, while professional, scientific and technical services grew 6.8 percent.
“San Jose is showing its first good year of job growth since the Great Recession had begun,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “It’s likely that 2015 and 2016 will be the beginning of a turnaround in San Jose.”
The moves by Apple in San Jose, along with a decision by Google to lease offices in the city, will add to that upswing, he said.
“San Jose is starting to develop as a tech center,” Levy said. “San Jose also is a lower-cost regional center compared with Palo Alto, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Mountain View. With the BART extensions and other mass transit coming online, San Jose could have a stronger cost advantage compared with other cities in the area.”
