“There’s just a lot more demand than there was a few years ago, and the supply side is not keeping up,” he said.

It’s a familiar story to Dusty Davidson of Omaha tech firm Flywheel. The company has similarly filled about 25 jobs outside Omaha recently that it would have preferred to fill here.

Lincoln financial services firm Nelnet has also been hiring technical workers at company locations in Wisconsin and Texas that it can’t find here. “We are always going to fill any we can in Nebraska,” said Nelnet CEO Jeff Noordhoek. “But if we can’t, we will fill them elsewhere.”

For more than two decades, Omaha was the fastest-growing of nearly two dozen employment hubs for CSG. Now it’s one of the slowest, Griess said, simply because “we can’t get the talent that we need.”

It’s not just high-tech job openings that are going wanting. The State Labor Department says there are more than 36,000 open jobs in Nebraska, across nearly all fields. The state chamber’s Slone estimated Nebraska’s manufacturing sector would grow by 10 percent right now if it could attract all the skilled workers it needs.