Sure, New York has finance and L.A. has entertainment, but it turns out Dallas is the king of telecom. Last month LinkedIn created a map of the key industries in major US and European metros. It parsed out the most common skills based on data found from 175 million users’ LinkedIn profiles. And with companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Samsung in our midst, telecom was the industry of choice for North Texas.
Back in 2011, Karen Nielsen penned a D CEO Special Report, where she explained why North Texas was a magnet for these corporations:
Twenty-seven years ago when the federal courts took apart Ma Bell, a massive influx of players from around the world began to claim equity stakes in Richardson’s Telecom Corridor.
With the shackles off local phone service monopolies, telecom giants like Northern Telecom, Fujitsu, MCI, Samsung, and Ericsson all wanted a piece of the action.
Fast forward to 2011. The Telecom Corridor still is home to about 600 companies, many of them telecom-related, such as MetroPCS, Fujitsu and Cisco Systems. But the cluster has diffused.
After telecom, LinkedIn found the most dominant sectors to be aviation, mortgage financing, and computer network and network administration.
The company conceded that people in varying industries and geographic locations use their website differently and these differences weren’t taken into consideration for their report.
Find the full list of Dallas’ most skilled sectors here.
