Forbes: Cloudy Skies For Tampa's Young Professionals

[TampaTower]

Cloudy Skies For Tampa's Young Professionals

Matt Woolsey, 06.21.07

Sunshine most of the year and beaches nearby make Tampa a good place to live or have a second home, but neither counts for much in the eyes of those looking to climb the corporate ladder.

Tampa came in last on our list of cities best for young professionals. Behind Detroit. Behind Indianapolis.

The main reason? It's just a slightly older person's town. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Tampa sits second-to-last among cities ranked for the number of those aged 20 to 35 and last for how many people in that demographic have never been married.

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Digging a bit deeper, just over a quarter of Tampa's housing stock is comprised of investment and second home buyers, according to Moody's Economy.com. Snowbirds and out-of-towners don't do much for young professionals looking to let loose.

On the business side, Tampa tied Detroit and Indianapolis for third-to-last in the number of 400 best big businesses and 200 best small businesses that call the city home. This significantly hampers Tampa's ability to attract top-flight grads and young professionals, as our graduate tracking metric indicates.

We used alumni data from six elite universities across the country to find out where their grads landed 10 years out of school. Tracking where young professionals end up not only indicates where the best opportunities lie, but also taps into a city's entertainment and lifestyle pulls.

Data from the Class of 1997 for Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Rice and Northwestern (excluding alumni who stayed in-state after college) placed Tampa 32nd out of the 40 biggest cities. Other cities in the South performed well in this measure. Atlanta was fifth, Austin seventh, Nashville 13th, and New Orleans was 17th overall. Florida as a whole struggled. Orlando came in 31st and Miami was 33rd.

What's worse for Tampa is that when costs add up, salaries aren't high enough to cover them. A recent college graduate working in Tampa earns 2.7% less than the national average for an entry-level position, according to New York-based Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which would be fine were it not for the high cost of living. Tampa finished with the lowest salary to cost of living score in our 40-city study.

But then again, there's no pricing for the value of sunshine in the winter months.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/21/cit...0621tampa.html

[Sunil]

Just confirms what many of us have been saying for a while. I grew up in Tampa and still live in the area...but if you work in any sort of corporation...this is not the place to be. It won't change unless something is done to attract some major Fortune 500 companies into the area.