COLORADO SPRINGS — Thousands of new jobs have been coming to the Colorado Springs area, and that includes jobs in very specific sectors.
One of the companies that expanded to Colorado Springs is Zivaro, an IT company specialized in serving government and the department of defense.
“Our goal as a company is to bring new jobs to Colorado Springs,” said Kristin Zick, the senior Vice President of engineering services at Zivaro.
The Denver-Based company expanded to the northern part of Colorado springs last year. Zivaro is one of more than 250 companies that chose Colorado Springs as their home to provide advanced technologies.
“Zivaro chose the Springs because of our natural alignment with DOD customers and partner companies. We have projects that work out at Peterson, out at Schriever and across the Front Range,” said Zick.
According to Theresa Metcalf with the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC, the Zivaro expansion is one of 15 projects, including expansion projects and new companies in El Paso and teller counties in the past 20 months. Metcalf said there are a few reasons why companies have sought out Colorado Springs as their home.
“I would say definitely an uptick in businesses wanting to be here to be able to partner with DOD, and then of course, the decision for U.S. Space Command to be permanent here in Colorado Springs has definitely been a driving factor,” said Metcalf.
Metcalf says these new highly-skilled jobs are specific to sectors like: aerospace and defense, cybersecurity and software development, and advanced manufacturing and semiconductor technology. The five military installations are another driving factor.
“Engineers, software developers, a lot of those jobs do require some kind of security clearance, which is great for our veterans in our community, as well as our transitioning men and women that are coming out of our service into our service in Colorado Springs,” said Metcalf.
According to Metcalf, more than 3,000 jobs have come to El Paso and Teller Counties in the past 20 months. They’re all above the El Paso County average annual wage of around $60,000.
“As far as the jobs themselves specifically, we're talking about highly skilled workforce that would be able to tap into those jobs,” said Metcalf, who added they’re high paying jobs with competitive benefits.
Zivaro is also expecting to create more than 300 new jobs over the next eight years at an average annual wage of $165,000 dollars.
“We hire cloud engineers, network engineers, operation center, software development, test engineer, so we're really focusing on the infrastructure for our customers,” said Zick.
More than 300 jobs tied to the clean energy industry are also coming to Colorado Springs. Meyer-Burger is a Switzerland-based manufacturer of solar cells and modules. They will begin production on a plant toward the end of 2024. They expect to create 350 new jobs with an average wage of about $77,000.
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