Spain: Companies desperate for tech talent up by 5% since 2012

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

Companies with tech profile needs have doubled in Spain in just six years.

Specifically, in 2018 11% of companies in Spain hired or initiated selection processes to hire talent with specific training in ICT - a rate that in 2012 was 6% - so in six years tech talent demand has almost doubled.

This has been highlighted by an analysis carried out by Randstad with Eurostat data on digital skills of the population and their impact on companies.

Spain is two percentage points ahead of the European average (9%) and countries such as the United Kingdom (10%), France (9%), or Portugal (7%). In the top positions of the ranking, with 13%, are Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

According to Rubén Berrocal, Director of Randstad Technologies: 

“The vast majority of organizations and businesses are constantly changing their way of producing and communicating with their customers. And in this process of transformation, technology plays an important role in its needs for internal talent towards digital and technological professionals. This change in the organizational paradigm necessarily implies a shift about their talent needs, which in turn represents a cultural challenge in attracting and retaining it. The countries with the greatest investment in technology and process automation are those with the highest per capita income and lower unemployment rates, so this transformation of the labor paradigm seems to take us in an appropriate direction."

Talent with ICT training

The high demand for profiles of this type predicts an increase in the importance of technological employment in our economy, still discreet compared to our neighbors.

18% of companies in Spain employ technological profiles, a rate two percentage points lower than the European average, which stands at 20%.

The European countries with the most companies with technological talent are Ireland (32%), Belgium (28%), Denmark (28%) and the Netherlands (27%), while countries such as France (17%) or Italy (16%) They are behind Spain.

In total, in Spain 362,000 employees have technological training, the second largest volume in Europe, only behind Germany (496,500) and ahead of countries such as the United Kingdom (315,400), France (296,500) or Italy (148,000).

The number of employees with ICT training has registered a positive trend since 2009, since then experiencing a growth of 26.4%, and 12.3% in the last year alone.

High gender gap

On the other hand, Randstad has warned of a marked gender gap at European level with regard to technology specialists employees.

In Spain, 79.1% of these professionals are male, for only 20.9% of women. Despite this important difference, our country is below the European average in the highest weight of men, 84.6%, while women represent 15.4%.

The countries with the greatest inequality are Belgium (92.6% of men versus 7.4% of women), Latvia (90.6% vs. 9.4%), Poland (90.4% versus 9.6%), Czech Republic (89.9% vs. 10.1%) and Hungary (88.8% vs. 11.2%).

The European countries with the highest weight of women as technological professionals are Serbia (27.8%), Turkey (26.7%), Romania (26.6%), Ireland (24.8%) and Cyprus (24.5 %).

21% of Spanish companies provide ICT training

Due to the increasing importance that technological profiles are acquiring in the labor market, 21% of the companies in our country provide ICT training to their employees.

Although our country does so to a greater degree than countries like France (19%), Portugal (19%) or Italy (17%), it is two points below the European average (23%). They lead the ranking Norway (42%), Belgium (36%), Finland (36%), Germany (30%) or Ireland (30%).

In addition, according to this Randstad study, Spain has ample room for improvement in terms of the digital skills of its citizens. Thus, 55% of the publication claims to have at least basic knowledge in this regard, a figure two points below the average for European countries (57%).

Luxembourg (85%), Iceland (85%), Netherlands (79%), Sweden (77%) and Norway (77%) are the countries in Europe where their citizens have greater digital skills.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

Join us February 26-27 for the Property Portal Watch Conference Bangkok 2020.