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St. Louis has been on the cutting edge of technology from its early days as the ‘gateway to the West.’ In 1904, St. Louis hosted the World’s Fair and debuted a number of pivotal technologies like the X-ray machine, the electrical plug and outlet, and the fax machine. Today, the city may not be as notable of a tech hub as the trendy cities of Silicon Valley, but it is an affordable place for start-ups to take off, a center of rigorous academic research, and the headquarters for Boeing’s Defense sector.
In the fall of 2015, the nonprofit Downtown STL, Inc. along with local leaders and tech companies set out to establish a downtown innovation district that would add 1,000 new tech companies and 10,000 highly skilled workers by 2025.
In 2020, DHS’s Science & Technology Directorate piloted a new program in St. Louis called the Smart City Interoperability Reference Architecture, or SCIRA. This initiative aims to test a variety of ‘smart city’ technologies and find ways for different systems to function seamlessly together (interoperate). SCIRA focused on testing these technologies mainly in emergency scenarios but the methods used in the pilot and resulting findings are also useful for day-to-day city management, said Robert Gaskill-Clemons, CTO for the City of St. Louis.
Smart city technologies that have been implemented in St. Louis over the past several years include interactive kiosks, smart streetlights, and free public wifi downtown.
All around, St. Louis is a great place for skilled bootcamp graduates to live and work. The unemployment rate in St. Louis is 3.8%, while the national average is 5.2%. Since the 2008 recession, employment in St. Louis has been steadily improving, with the exception of a spike during the covid-19 pandemic, which the city has now mostly recovered from.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a metric called the Location Quotient to indicate which jobs are relatively more common in certain cities compared to other places. In St. Louis, jobs that are particularly popular by this metric include computer programmers, network administrators, financial analysts, data scientists, web developers, systems analysts, user support specialists, network architects, CNC programmers, network support specialists, and database administrators.
Major employers in and around the city include AT&T, Boeing, Edward Jones, Emerson Electric, Anheuser-Busch, Express Scripts, Ameren, Energizer, Esco Technologies, HOK, and the Lambert International Airport. The city also has a major academic presence and two of its biggest employers are the local universities St. Louis University (SLU) and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL).
Apart from these major employers, St. Louis makes an effort to attract and foster small start-ups as well, with efforts led by organizations like Downtown STL, Inc. and a major local institution called ArchGrants, which plans an annual grant competition. The fastest growing companies in St. Louis are Bayer Crop Science, EmpowerMe Wellness, Geneoscopy, the McAfee Institute, The Home Loan Expert, SteadyMD, Benson Hill, and Textel.
Completion of a Digital Marketing Bootcamps can help you find employment as a Digital Marketing analyst, Digital Marketer, Social Media Manager, Digital Marketing Specialist, and more. Other job titles within the field include Content Strategist, SEO Specialist or Email Marketing Specialist or Research Analyst. Below we’ve listed out average salaries from Indeed for a number of different positions, although figures can vary widely by city and level of specialization. Demand for these roles is increasing across the board, so many roles offer additional bonus compensation or other perks.
| Job Title | Average Salary (May 2020) |
|---|---|
| Computer Programmer | $86,600 |
| Network Administrator | $92,220 |
| Financial Analyst | $91,320 |
| Data Scientist | $97,260 |
| Web Developer | $70,990 |
| Systems Analyst | $91,660 |
| User Support Specialist | $55,590 |
| Network Architect | $106,510 |
