Texas

Public employers in Texas

32 of Texas's 254 counties are classified by the USDA as government-dependent, meaning federal, state or local government is a leading employer there. That is the most directly relevant classification on this page: federal technical employment is not only Washington, and veterans' preference plus the special appointing authorities work at every one of those installations, medical centres, campuses and offices.

State and county government, school districts, public utilities and transit authorities run IT operations in Texas too, and all of them hire without requiring a technology-corridor address.

Rural Texas

168 of Texas's 254 counties sit outside every metropolitan area. That matters here more than in most campaigns, because veterans are disproportionately rural nationally — 24.1% live in rural areas against 19.3% of the total population, a gap of 4.8 points.

Which means the rural training problem and the veteran training problem are substantially the same people. The routes that survive distance are the ones to lead with: VR&E and GI Bill funding follow you rather than sitting in a building, online and hybrid programmes are covered, and remote federal and contractor technical roles are a real and growing market.

See also Outside Every Metro in Texas, which covers the same counties from the schooling side.

What Texas runs on

Of 254 counties, the most common economic types are mining and energy (65), farming (63), government (32). Where the employers are field services, transport and equipment contractors, the technical work already here is the systems those operations depend on — and a veteran who maintained comparable systems in service is closer to that job than almost any other candidate.