Detroit No. 3 Among ‘Surprising’ Cities Millennials Love

DETROIT, MI — Don’t count Detroit out as a hot city for millennials, the largest generation in the world, who collectively will spend about $200 billion in purchasing power in 2017.

That’s according to a LinkedIn survey ranking Detroit No. 3 as a top destination among millennial job searchers, and also revealing younger job seekers aren’t shy about changing jobs or advancing their careers in less urban cities.

The social networking site for the business community says that 44 percent of all job searches begin on its network, and the study was launched to better understand millennials’ shifting job preferences.

LinkedIn said that over the past year, interest in mid-sized cities has grown 25 percent more than interest in larger cities.

Detroit ranked third, behind Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, and ahead of Cleveland/Akron area in Ohio and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Fueling millennials’ interest in Detroit are more than 44,000 jobs, mainly in the automotive, internet technology services, and marketing and advertising sectors, according to the study.

The three most popular companies are General Motors, Ford and Quicken Loans.

There’s a caveat:

“While these cities are seeing the biggest spike in job seeking among millennials, these aren’t the top cities where millennials have been moving to — yet,” LinkedIn said.

Pacific Northwest cities like Seattle and Portland, as well as Denver, have seen the biggest increase in housing prices across the United States, “which may be why we’re seeing millennials favor these other cities now,” LinkedIn said.

LinkedIn said the study is based on how its users, but said results can vary based on professional, social and regional culture, as well as site availability and accessibility. Such variances are not accounted for in the analytics, LinkedIn said.

For the purposes of the study, millennials are those people who graduated with bachelor’s degrees from 2001-2011 and who used LinkedIn over the past 12 months. More on the methodology can be found here.

Photo by Holly Zade via Flickr Commons