Key Findings
In this report, we analyzed the employment of digital talent, the representativeness of digital skills and the flow of digital talent across 26 cities in 11 worldwide city clusters. By comparing the industry distribution, education, seniority, skill characteristics of digital talents across multiple cities, we attempted to identify unique strength - of each city cluster and provided valuable insights around how each city can build upon its existing comparative advantages. We also studied the flow of talent within and between cities, as an indicator of the global transfer of knowledge as well as development of international connectivity and digital innovation.
1. While digital talent is strongly represented in both ICT and non-ICT industries, we observed that the proportion of digital talent in non-ICT industries was higher than that in ICT industries overall. This is a promising indication that digitization is expanding beyond ICT into other industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, corporate services, consumer goods, education, and media and communications.
2. At the same time, we noticed that the proportion of digital talent across different industries also reflected the varying economic emphasis of the city that the industries were located in - for example, financial hubs like New York and London had higher proportions of digital talent in the finance industry, while commercial and innovative centers such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen showed greater concentration of digital talent in the consumer goods industry. This suggests that the digitization path is closely related to a region’s existing strengths, since it is more efficient to build off existing infrastructure and ecosystems.
3. Looking at the representative digital skills, we saw that each city had its own unique set of representative digital skills and competitive advantages. Looking at the digital skills penetration ratio within each cluster, we also saw that cities within a cluster had distinctive traits - for example, in the Boston-Washington cluster, Washington was relatively stronger in cybersecurity while Boston was stronger in robotics.
4. We classified digital skills into tech skills and disruptive tech skills for further analysis. We observed that: 1) city clusters that have competitive advantage in both tech skills and disruptive tech skills include: Boston-Washington city cluster, SF Bay Area, UK-Ireland city cluster, Sydney Bay Area and Bangalore; 2) city clusters that have competitive advantage in disruptive tech skills include: Germany city cluster, Triple J (Jing-Jin-Ji) City Cluster, YRD city cluster and Singapore.
5. Boston-Washington city cluster is the most important source of digital talent in the world major city clusters. Besides, there is a greater tendency to migrate within one’s cluster, or to clusters which are geographically nearer. We also found that the flow of digital talent showed different characteristics in within-region migration and between-region migration. For instance, Boston-Washington, UK-Ireland and Germany city clusters tend to have more within-region migration, while the clusters in China (Yangtze River Delta, Greater Bay Area and Triple J behave the opposite, exchanging more with digital talent from outside of the regions.
