The Chicago Quantum Exchange launched a free career tool today that offers job and internship seekers access to hundreds of open roles within the CQE community’s more than 60 quantum employers, a move aimed at improving candidates’ access to the fast-growing ecosystem and enabling CQE members and partners an avenue for identifying talent with specific skills.
The new CQE Talent Portal, made possible by a grant from the Brinson Foundation, includes a searchable listing of open positions around the world and a searchable talent network accessible to CQE employers. At launch, the board included 755 jobs with 62 employers, all of which are CQE members or partners.
“The CQE’s roster of industry partners represents some of the world's leading pure play quantum companies, as well as potential end users such as Allstate, BMO, and KPMG — each of which are at the forefront of integrating quantum innovation into their respective industries,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the founding director of the CQE. “This tool offers a curated list of opportunities and represents an important step toward creating smooth pathways into the sector at a time of rapid growth and rising demand for talent.”
CQE Talent Portal users can also learn more about individual CQE employers, sign up for job alerts, and join a talent network that will ultimately enable employers to search for candidates with specific skill combinations or other qualifications.
The idea for the Talent Portal grew from a desire to help alumni of the Open Quantum Initiative (OQI) undergraduate fellowship easily access internships within the CQE community.
“Anyone who's been in the workforce for a while knows that one of the primary ways people get jobs is through an informal network referral,” said Emily Easton, the CQE’s director of education and workforce development. “We see this all the time: a company will reach out looking for someone with specific skills, and we often make those connections. But how do you scale that kind of referral? This career tool is an important first step in achieving that.”
The Talent Portal is the latest addition to the CQE’s growing suite of quantum career resources, including Q-Ready, a free professional development program that launched in March and has already drawn nearly 500 eligible quantum job seekers — undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, OQI applicants, and alumni of the online Quantum Science, Networking and Communications course. The Talent Portal launch also follows the release of a new CQE report, “Advancing Together: A Unified Strategy for Scaling Midwest Quantum Talent,” which outlines a five-point plan for meeting the region’s growing need for quantum workers by improving access to and mobility within the quantum job market, among other actions.
Meeting growing demand
The number of quantum jobs in the Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana region is expected to skyrocket over the coming decade, with as many as 191,000 roles at all levels expected by 2035, according to a 2024 analysis by Boston Consulting Group for the Chicago Quantum Exchange.
“Building a strong, sustainable workforce relies very heavily on talent being able to find opportunities,” Easton said. “We want to make those opportunities as easy to find as possible, and we are leveraging technology to make this easier.”
Talent, after all, is the key driver of a successful technology ecosystem, CQE CEO Kate Timmerman said.
“We must ensure access and mobility for a wide range of talented quantum professionals at all levels in order to scale quantum innovations for real-world use,” Timmerman said. “This is at the heart of our Midwest workforce strategy — and an important component of the CQE’s mission to build a fully integrated discovery-to-deployment quantum ecosystem.”
Job seekers who visit the board can filter by job function, salary, seniority, location, and more, and they can apply directly from the site.
The CQE is working directly with member and partner employers to optimize job postings within Talent Portal and make effective use of the Portal’s talent network. By offering candidates the ability to consider a broad range of factors — and employers the ability to consider a broad range of qualified candidates — the odds of strong matches increase, Easton said.
“A strong workforce is about more than hiring — it’s about retention, too,” Easton said. “Our ultimate goal is to integrate the needs of talent and the needs of our employers so we can scale a robust, sustainable quantum workforce. The Talent Portal will help us do that.”