Tech jobs clustered around Oxford and Cambridge, finds report

Reading, Manchester and Southampton are also hotspots finds Tech City UK report

Technology jobs in the UK tend to be concentrated in smaller cities around the top English universities, with Cambridge having the highest concentration of tech jobs in the UK.

These are among the findings of a research report by Tech City UK (PDF), which has been combined with population data by the BBC.

Fifteen out of every 1,000 Cambridge residents are employed in the sector, but the M4 corridor and the Oxford/Abingdon area are not far behind.

Cambridge specialises in AI, according to the BBC, and home-grown tech companies include ARM and Autonomy, now both acquired by foreign firms. Locally headquartered Cambridge firms include Darktrace, Frontier Developments and Featurespace.

The Thames Valley/M4 corridor, meanwhile, has long been a home for big tech companies with its convenient links to London and Heathrow, while Oxford seems to attract cyber security, health technology and gaming firms and is home to Sophos and Oxford Instruments, among others.

The Reading area counts giant multinationals such as Microsoft, Symantec and Wipro among its employers, and there is a tendency for security and analytics firms to have bases in the area. Reading University is also known for its technology courses.

But it's not all London and the south east of England. The capital is an important tech hub, but barely features on a per-population basis in comparison with the smaller cities around it.

Manchester is one of the few big cities with a high concentration of tech jobs, boasting 10 tech jobs per 1,000 head of population; Souhampton has the same. Manchester plays host to Google and has a strong app development and digital marketing culture, while Southampton specialises in e-commerce, hardware and data analytics, according to the BBC.

Scotland and Wales have less of a tech focus with four jobs per 1,000 residents in Glasgow and Edinburgh and three in Cardiff and Swansea. Financial and health technology seems to be a specialism in Scotland and Wales, while Belfast, with two tech jobs per 1,000, is Northern Ireland's business software hub.

Overall there are 1.56 million tech jobs in the UK, and the sector is growing faster than the wider economy, according to the Tech City report.

Analytics jobs such as data scientist continue to command the highest salaries.