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Job outlook for studio technicians in the United States
Are studio technician jobs in demand?
Studio technician job and salary trends over time
Studio technician jobs over time
Studio technician job growth rate over time
| Year | # of jobs | % of population |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 812 | 0.00% |
| 2020 | 1,001 | 0.00% |
| 2019 | 1,187 | 0.00% |
| 2018 | 1,219 | 0.00% |
| 2017 | 1,167 | 0.00% |
Average studio technician salary over time
Studio technician salary by year
| Year | Avg. salary | Hourly rate | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $32,545 | $15.65 | +4.4% |
| 2024 | $31,180 | $14.99 | +4.9% |
| 2023 | $29,727 | $14.29 | +3.7% |
| 2022 | $28,654 | $13.78 | --0.1% |
| 2021 | $28,681 | $13.79 | +1.9% |
Studio technician jobs by state
Most common states for studio technicians
| Rank | State | Population | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 693,972 | 121 | 17% |
| 2 | Maine | 1,335,907 | 163 | 12% |
| 3 | Alaska | 739,795 | 90 | 12% |
| 4 | Vermont | 623,657 | 68 | 11% |
| 5 | Massachusetts | 6,859,819 | 628 | 9% |
| 6 | Colorado | 5,607,154 | 450 | 8% |
| 7 | Minnesota | 5,576,606 | 443 | 8% |
| 8 | Connecticut | 3,588,184 | 280 | 8% |
| 9 | Iowa | 3,145,711 | 255 | 8% |
| 10 | Utah | 3,101,833 | 250 | 8% |
| 11 | New Hampshire | 1,342,795 | 102 | 8% |
| 12 | Delaware | 961,939 | 81 | 8% |
| 13 | Illinois | 12,802,023 | 864 | 7% |
| 14 | North Carolina | 10,273,419 | 735 | 7% |
| 15 | Missouri | 6,113,532 | 444 | 7% |
| 16 | Maryland | 6,052,177 | 413 | 7% |
| 17 | Wisconsin | 5,795,483 | 388 | 7% |
| 18 | South Carolina | 5,024,369 | 346 | 7% |
| 19 | West Virginia | 1,815,857 | 119 | 7% |
| 20 | Rhode Island | 1,059,639 | 75 | 7% |
Most common cities for studio technicians
| Rank | City | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl | Avg. salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mamaroneck | 1 | 3% | $30,533 |
| 2 | Laguna Niguel | 1 | 2% | $43,849 |
| 3 | Rancho Santa Margarita | 1 | 2% | $43,788 |
| 4 | Scottsdale | 2 | 1% | $23,919 |
| 5 | College Station | 1 | 1% | $24,184 |
| 6 | Salt Lake City | 1 | 1% | $24,896 |
| 7 | New York | 2 | 0% | $30,358 |
| 8 | Henderson | 1 | 0% | $38,207 |
| 9 | San Diego | 1 | 0% | $43,246 |
Studio Technician job outlook: Expert opinions
Our panel of studio technician experts
Georgia State University
Columbia College Chicago
Drexel University
Florida State University
University of North Texas
What soft skills should all Studio Technicians possess?
Jill Frank: Listening, being observant, trusting your vision. It is always important to work well in teams and have the patience to be a good collaborator.
What skills will help Studio Technicians earn the most?
Jill Frank: This is probably too abstract a question for the field of art, but I will try my best: the better you are at taking photographs and marketing yourself & the better you are at moving seamlessly across different media and speaking to the relevant issues, the greater your success will be.
What are the biggest trends we'll see in the Studio Technician job market given the pandemic?
Duncan MacKenzie: The fine arts' job market is always aggressively entrepreneurial and requires our practitioners to establish their voice and space. With many of our more traditional paths squeezed or closed, we see an increased enthusiasm for online venues and the kinds of work that can support them. After the pandemic, we expect to see a return to the materially based practices and those with performative and social aspects, as the audience will be looking for less mediated experiences.
What are the biggest trends we'll see in the Studio Technician job market given the pandemic?
Michael Wagner: We primarily serve the traditional digital media industries (game design, animation, visual effects, VR/AR, etc.). In our fields, the pandemic's most significant trend is the rapid development of solutions for virtualizing digital media production systems. Companies have started to move much of their production into cloud-based development environments that allow developers to work in geographically dispersed teams.
What general advice would you give to a Studio Technician?
Michael Neal Ph.D.: The advice can be tricky, especially since our graduates go into a number of fields. My hope for them is that they continue to build upon what they learned in our program and apply it to new situations and contexts outside of school. I often tell students that editing, writing, and media aren't skills you master and then apply universally across contexts. Instead, we encourage students to keep growing and stretching themselves, since they will most likely face new genres, audiences, and contexts that they didn't see in college. Therefore, we teach them to be flexible, to be close readers, and analyze each rhetorical situation to determine how to best communicate within that context. Good writing isn't one-size-fits-all. Instead, it's a complex, negotiated relationship between writers, texts, contexts, audiences, media, modalities, etc.
What technology do you think will become more important and prevalent for Studio Technicians in the next 3-5 years?
Johnathan Paul: We've slowly seen more and more companies in film, television, and video game development move a portion of their business to online and remote for the past ten years. However, with the global pandemic, we've seen those new models get pushed to the forefront in a concise amount of time. With that said, my classes have been integrating communication and project management apps into the classroom workflow and the core creative tools I use. So apps such as Zoom, Slack, Notion, Frame.io, Evercast, etc. are heavily used in my class, as students will now need to have a working knowledge of some or all of these applications once they move into the industry.