Houston isn't stereotypically viewed as a tech hub like Silicon Valley or Austin. Yet the Houston metro area's tech employment base continues to grow at an impressive hub-type pace.

According to CompTIA, a trade group for the IT industry, employers in the Houston area posted openings for 14,714 tech jobs in the third quarter of 2021, up 44 percent from the same period last year. Through the first nine months of this year, Houston-area employers listed nearly 39,000 openings for tech positions.

CompTIA says Microsoft was the most active Houston-area employer last month in terms of postings for tech jobs — 130. It was followed by Deloitte (115) and JPMorgan Chase (52).

Among the most in-demand positions in the Houston area are software developer, software quality assurance analyst, computer user support specialist, computer systems analyst, and database administrator, CompTIA says.

A report released earlier this year by CompTIA ranks Houston as the country's No. 1 metro area for the share of tech workers employed at non-tech businesses — 62.2 percent (compared with 34.8 percent in the Austin metro area). According to the Greater Houston Partnership, this figure helps explain why Houston "isn't a more visible tech hub."

CompTIA tallied 243,908 tech workers in Houston last year, putting it in 11th place for total tech employment among U.S. metro areas. That compares with 426,286 in the San Francisco metro area (No. 4) and 373,695 in Dallas-Fort Worth (No. 11).

The ranks of tech workers in Houston are expanding in part because of an influx of tech talent. Among major metro areas, Houston claimed the No. 2 spot for the next gain of tech workers (10.4 percent compared with the previous 12-month span) moving from other regions from March 2019 to February 2020, according to LinkedIn data cited by the Axios news website. Only Miami ranked higher (15.4 percent).

While Houston may not necessarily be the next Silicon Valley, it "is winning the competition to establish tech hubs in Texas," MarketWatchdeclared in July.

The article cites the move of the headquarters for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) from Silicon Valley to Spring as an example of Houston's ascendance in the tech economy. The HPE relocation "offers a vivid snapshot of a new tech frontier," MarketWatch observes, where the energy sector, major local universities, the Texas Medical Center, Mayor Sylvester Turner's office, and the local tech ecosystem are collaborating on cloud computing and other innovations.

"I want the rest of the world to know how much Houston is changing," Amy Chronis, managing director of Deloitte's Houston office, told MarketWatch. "The wakeup call was Amazon looking at candidates for HQ2, and Houston not making the second cut. Not enough technological talent was their reason. It was incorrect, but it lit a fire here."