Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2012; the figure of roughly 5 million unemployed in Spain, the list of most in-demand professions and the comparison of tech company valuations in 2012 and 1999 reflect that moment.
When people talk about emerging sectors for finding work, some of you will have noticed that it is practically impossible to leave new technologies out of it. Businesses have to be online, companies have to have a presence on social networks, job candidates have to have a kind of social CV, and startups are the future.
People like to shout “This is where the jobs are”, and in fact a list of the most in-demand professions has just been published (again), professions that will supposedly create enough jobs to lift a large share of the unemployed out of joblessness. That’s the theory, although in practice we are going to look at the drawbacks.
The professions in demand, the jobs that will lift Spaniards out of unemployment, are these:
- Community manager.
- Web analytics expert.
- Information architect.
- Web designer.
- Content editor.
- Functional analyst.
- Usability expert.
- E-business consultant.
- Webmaster.
- Affiliate marketing manager.
- Product manager.
- SEM specialist.
- SEO expert.
- Programmer.
- Head of IT systems.
- Support technician.
- Ad trafficker (digital campaign traffic manager).
This is where the jobs are. The problem is that, of the roughly 5 million unemployed people in Spain, a figure that will probably become 6 million, most have no knowledge of these fields. What’s more, they don’t even have an average level of knowledge of new technologies, so these jobs are not for them.
On the other hand, it is alarming to see that we are coming out of the property bubble, in which everyone worked directly or indirectly in construction, only to try to make everything revolve around new technologies now, because that would bring us close to a new dot-com bubble.
Not to mention that our education system and universities don’t prepare even 15% of these new professional profiles, so university degrees are being required for jobs that are currently very well paid, without a clear idea of what the professional profile actually is.
This is where the jobs are, this is where the future is, this is where… we are probably getting close to the next bubble.
A few months ago we put together a comparison showing that five tech companies today (not counting Google) are worth more than 25 tech companies were worth in 1999, although we are told that this time the business model is sustainable and viable. Some of us remain somewhat sceptical from an investor’s point of view, because we will never be able to understand how a company that has made nothing but losses so far can be worth more than 3 billion. We are probably just getting old-fashioned.
That said, we also make the mistake of pushing entrepreneurs towards startups by selling them the idea that it’s all plain sailing, when the failure rate today is astonishingly high and investors are, little by little, growing more afraid of putting money into these companies. Even so, the truth is that, for now, this is the sector creating the most jobs.
Further reading
- University degrees with the worst job prospects
- The professionals Spain needs and has to bring in from abroad
Featured image: Travis Isaacs, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
