The industry that offers the highest salaries in Romania is short of employees. What are the most sought after IT specializations and how can staff shortages be addressed

For several years, the Romanian IT industry has been constantly developing, making massive employments and offering the highest salaries in the market, but even so the companies in the field have difficulties in filling the vacancies.

Studies show that Romania has a higher number of engineers per capita than the USA, India, China or Russia with bachelor's and master's degrees in high technologies and certificates obtained at a fairly young age and we are the 6th country in the world, over the UK, Germany and Canada in terms of IT specialists. However, the number of experts who end up working in the field, annually, is below the level of market requirements, where the demand for specialists is three times higher than the supply.

Romania has firmly positioned itself, in recent years, as a reference center in the regional IT industry, with a very fast growth rate - a pace also confirmed by the figures of the Employers Association of the Software and Services Industry (ANIS0, which estimates the turnover of the sector software and IT services to 3.08 billion euros in 2015, business that doubled in 2019 to 5.9 billion euros.

"Every year, more and more IT companies choose to open local centers, in order to capitalize on the talented workforce in the country. As a natural consequence, the number of available jobs increased, while the number of graduates remained relatively constant, leading to this imbalance between supply and demand. The advantage of this situation, however, is that the dynamics of the sector have created new career opportunities from the most varied and interesting, with growth and development potential for employees ", explains the Senior Recruitment Manager of ALTEN Romania.

The data of the National Institute of Statistics indicate, at least in recent years, that employees in the IT and engineering industry have among the highest average salaries in Romania. However, Romania has far too few engineers and IT specialists trained in the public education system.

"The education system must adapt to the year in which we live. We need engineers to study and develop in the 'new reality'. We need modern laboratories and the involvement of teachers to create not only graduates who are reservoirs of information, but future professionals with a mentality adapted to the present. However, we, as employers, those who benefit from the 'product' of universities, should become more and more involved in offering them support ", the Senior Recruitment Manager believes.

The most sought after specializations in the IT industry in Romania

According to a Codecool study from 2019, the most sought after jobs in the IT industry in Romania are those of SQL Developers, Java Developers, Full-Stack Developers, Data Analyst, Front End Developer, BI Analyst, Database Administrator, DevOps Engineer, Software Developer , Machine Learning Engineer.

"In our company, the most sought after specializations are, in IT - from QA Engineers, to Business Analysts, developers of different technologies, Project Managers and Architects, and in the engineering industry - mainly the specializations of Software Engineer - Embedded C, Tester , Developer. The demand for labor exceeds, at the moment, the supply, and this makes any company, including us, look with much more attention and openness to the concrete capabilities of people than to the way they have acquired them or if are accompanied by a college degree. I believe, therefore, that the entire industry will only benefit from the growing number of people interested in such professional courses in the IT field, especially in the context in which 2020 has shown us that digitalization will be an essential element of the future in May. all fields of activity ", says the representative of ALTEN Romania.

Also, another option to gain knowledge in the field are the training courses in the IT field, which are more and more from year to year, which offer education in the area of ​​the newest and most demanded technologies and through which everyone is passionate. can qualify and make a career in this industry.

"Professional reconversion can be done at this age. Just this month I hired a person who worked at HoReCa last year and is around 40 years old. Of course, the ease and duration of this process depends on the pace of each, as well as the knowledge he has. For example, a person who attended a high school with a real profile, can make a professional reconversion in the IT area with greater ease ", says the Senior Recruitment Manager.

A world leader in engineering and technical consulting, the ALTEN group conducts research and development projects for top companies in all industrial, telecommunications and services sectors around the world. At the end of 2019, ALTEN Romania registered a turnover of approx. 25 million euros. The team of specialists is involved in software development projects, business analysis, business intelligence (BI), project management, technical support, automotive engineering or hardware design.