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Innovation

For Ivy League grads, tech trumps Wall Street

Fresh-faced grads and young professionals are bypassing Wall Street for a chance to work at a tech startup.
Written by Kirsten Korosec, Contributor

Wall Street, once a powerful seductress of fresh-faced Ivy League grads, is losing out to the geekier world of technology startups.

A wave of young professionals--as well as recent grads--are bypassing (or leaving) Wall Street to take jobs within the high-tech sector, reported the Wall Street Journal. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in New York City, where employments in securities and banking fell 10 percent to 163,600 jobs in the past five years. Over the same time period, high-tech employments rose 10 percent to 275,600 by mid-2010, according to data from the New York State Department of Labor, reported the WSJ.

A couple of factors are driving this shift, including a slew of new regulations within big finance that has limited compensation as well as lingering public criticism against the industry for damage during the financial crisis. Young workers at high-tech job also cited more abstract reasons like having the chance to build something new.

Cities also have made concerted efforts to attract high-tech companies by offering financing and mentorship programs.

New graduates might want to consider looking for high-tech (or finance) jobs in cities like San Jose, Calif., Houston, Texas or Phoenix. These cities might not seem like they'd be able to compete with entrepreneurial hubs like New York City. But according to data compiled by CareerBliss, they are some of the best places for young professional to be happy. Other top cities that score high in the happiness scale including San Diego, San Francisco and Boston.

Photo: stock.xchng

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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