Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2012. The figures it cites are from that month: 3% growth, turnover of around 90 billion euros, 9% from digital content, over 50% of job offers in Madrid and Barcelona, and 33% of candidates unwilling to relocate.
According to Adolfo Borrero, president of the Association of Information and Communication Technology Companies (Eticom), Spain’s ICT sector has grown by 3% and turns over around 90 billion euros, and it is considered one of the sectors with the most growth potential in Spain.
Roughly 9% of total turnover comes from entrepreneurs in the digital content industry (video games, apps, multimedia software…). Given that our small and medium-sized businesses are still very green when it comes to using new technologies, this sector will help them make the leap to using social media strategies.
However, a study by TicJob, a job portal specialising in the ICT sector, says that companies in the sector complain about the lack of qualified professionals in Spain. “There’s a lack of talent, and university enrolments have fallen.”
Then again, the problem could lie with the companies themselves, since a university degree isn’t enough for them: they also ask for extensive work experience. As a result, new graduates sometimes have only two options: work for a very low salary or leave the country to find better-paid job offers.
The good news, though, is that while companies struggle to find talent, these young people, unable to gain work experience, decide to start their own businesses. So in a couple of years this will be a sector with enormous competition, which means that, even though it’s a sector with a future, it will at the same time become very unattractive (risk of a bubble).
Even so, entrepreneurs are currently coming up with business ideas that offer companies different solutions for raising productivity and improving profitability, such as gamification.
A change within the change
Until now, many companies hadn’t had time to take advantage of the benefits the internet offers businesses, since it was a relatively quick change. Now the next change has to be made: the computer is already becoming outdated and attention is shifting to the mobile phone, so professionals or firms capable of steering companies through that change will be needed.
The TicJob study concludes that more than 50% of the companies looking for professionals are in Madrid and Barcelona, and that 33% of the professionals who could fill those jobs are not willing to move to get them.
That figure shows that our country lives in a technological era with a Stone Age mentality. As a rule, the salaries these companies pay aren’t attractive enough to drop everything for a job, but companies forget that for most of the tasks involved, there’s no need to set foot in the office. Remote work? That would be one option, in principle. In a previous article we looked at the most in-demand professions in the ICT sector, where the functional analyst, the SEO expert and the community manager reign supreme.
Featured image: Lbronn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
