One of the main concerns of companies around the world is the shortage of technology talent. According to the latest Randstad report, carried out together with the CEOE business association, 75% of Spanish companies are unable to fill vacancies for technological profiles.

According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics, in the second quarter of 2023, 155,797 vacancies were registered in our country. However, according to the latest edition of the 'Technological Employment in the Spanish Market' report carried out by UGT, 230,000 net jobs have been created since the third quarter of 2019, reaching one million technological jobs in Spain.

As the union warns: "Although technology employment is increasing in our country, we are still far from the level of Europe and other economies." That is, although the rate of specialization of workers in Spain is increasing (4.3% higher per year), this percentage is far below the technological employment created in Germany (5%) or Portugal (4.5%).

High unemployment skills

One of the surprises revealed by the UGT study is that the employment rate of those people with ICT knowledge is 85.1, being the penultimate lowest in Europe (the average is 92.6). The high employability of people with technological knowledge is remarkable in Malta (98), Belgium (97.3) or Germany (97.1).

In other words, although there is a good base of workers who are trained to develop jobs with technical expertise, Spanish companies are not hiring.
According to the research, the main technological employment niche is occupied by the technical services and R&D specialties of programming, consulting, engineering and architecture, while sectors such as telecommunications continue to lose workers.

The report on the state of technological employment carried out by the UGT also raises a serious imbalance between the salaries received by technological workers in Spain. The union has warned that while tech companies are increasing profits, workers' wages are losing purchasing power.

As the research shows, this salary imbalance is a difference of over 10,000 euros for the same job in Germany, 50% less than in Denmark. To generate the scale, the study uses data from The Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2022, which indicates that a Spanish tech company assigns a salary of 36,000 euros per year to a software engineer at a startup, while an equivalent position in Germany would receive 62,000 euros per year or 74,000 euros in Denmark. .

The union points to inflated figures about talent shortages that companies have been reporting for years. ""We are forced, this time in a more synthetic way, to refute this myth of our time". According to INE data, there are 9,243 unfilled ICT vacancies. A far cry from the hundreds of thousands that companies are proposing.

The report uses data from the survey on the evolution of activity carried out by the Bank of Spain and, despite the increase in the percentage of companies that have difficulty filling vacancies, the technological sector registers percentages of 44%, construction and hospitality 54%, or transport 51%.

It is striking to review the latest Catalog of Hard-to-Fill Occupations, prepared by SEPE, which includes more than 1,000 hard-to-fill occupations. Among them, there are no vacancies in the technology sector. This shows that it is more complicated for companies to fill an aluminum, metal and PVC carpenter job than an IT technician.

The data indicates that 77.31% of these "difficulties" are due to "too high salary expectations of applicants". 72.70% of applicants are cited due to lack of adequate ICT work experience, and 66.67% are not covered due to lack of candidates who do not respond to applications. The union pointed out that "there is such a lack of interest in hiring technologists that our labor market ranks last in Europe in companies that took ICT jobs that were difficult to fill".

Little tech talent

The labor market has experienced a revolution for years, and not only because of the massive (and mandatory) acceptance of telecommuting that began in 2020. Widespread phenomena such as the Great Resignation or the mass layoffs of 2022 repeated in 2024 increase the pressure.

This phenomenon is compounded by the difficulty of finding professionals with a specific technical profile, which makes it even more difficult to fill vacancies, which affects 75% of companies, as indicated in the latest report by Randstad and CEOE, carried out together with employers.

According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics, in the last quarter of 2023, 155,797 vacancies were registered in our country, of which 9,055 were in the industrial sector, 6,160 in construction and the highest percentage in the service sector, with 140,582 vacancies.

The talent shortage will become chronic in 2024. For years, companies have been reporting a serious mismatch between training and the actual needs of companies. These differences have caused companies to keep vacant positions unfilled for months. The problem is exacerbated when the company is an SME or in depopulated areas of Spain, where 16% of cases remain uncovered.