But California’s unemployment rate stayed at a high 12 percent and the state lost almost 12,000 jobs between February and March. This marked the end of five months of consecutive jobs gains.

Pasadena, CA -- (SBWire) -- 04/28/2011 -- Silicon Valley kept adding jobs in its core business of technology areas in March. The area added around 3,300 private sector jobs in March.

Around 1,400 jobs were created in important tech areas, while another 900 were created in the education and healthcare sector. The demand for skilled computer programmers and related tech professionals continued at tech giants such as Google and Facebook. In San Mateo County, home to several tech firms, the jobless rate was 8.4 percent. This was the third-lowest unemployment rate in the state. Santa Clara County’s unemployment rate stayed around the same at 10.3 percent.

A large part of the growth was accounted by the fact that California got 51.2 percent of all the venture capital funding. Out of this, Silicon Valley got around 40 percent of that amount. This resulted in startups being able to start on and expand their projects. Brad Kemp of Beacon Economics says that since companies nationwide are investing in efficiency and automation, Silicon Valley benefits from that.

But California’s unemployment rate stayed at a high 12 percent and the state lost almost 12,000 jobs between February and March.

This marked the end of five months of consecutive jobs gains. But Silicon Valley keeps adding jobs as evidenced from the number of job openings on InformationTechnologyCrossing.

InformationTechnologyCrossing, a job aggregator site, has been able to find around 15,000 tech jobs in Silicon Valley.