skills shortage
137,000 vacancies for IT experts despite mass layoffs
After the labor market in the IT sector had recovered somewhat during the Corona period, the number of unfilled positions rose to 137,000 last year. photo
© Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
IT companies such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Twitter are laying off tens of thousands of employees worldwide, including in Germany. At the same time, many German companies are looking for IT experts. How does that fit together?
Gloomy economic prospects are forcing a number of global tech companies to cut costs on a large scale over the past few weeks. The main victims are tens of thousands of employees who lose their jobs. Although the wave of layoffs is rolling mainly through the corporate headquarters in the USA, a number of jobs have also been cut in Germany. On the other hand, according to the Bitkom industry association, there are 137,000 vacancies for IT experts in Germany.
The list of IT companies stepping on the brakes on costs is long. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, announced it was laying off 11,000 employees, about 13 percent of the workforce. At Amazon, jobs of a similar magnitude are expected to be lost, even if this is a much smaller proportion of the workforce with a total of 1.6 million employees. Salesforce, Lyft, Stripe, Snap, and other tech companies have also been laying off workers on a massive scale recently. Tech billionaire Elon Musk even halved Twitter’s headcount after buying the company.
The tech giants remain silent when asked about the details of the job losses. But it is clear that jobs will not only be cut in administration or in the human resources or PR departments, but also in product development. A few months ago, the affected companies were desperately looking for engineers and software developers.
Layoffs at Amazon
However, the deteriorated economic conditions are causing even highly profitable corporations like Amazon to take a closer look at where money is being made and where losses are piling up. According to reports in the “New York Times” and the “Wall Street Journal”, the new CEO Andy Jassy is now making cuts, especially with Amazon’s hardware team, which is also responsible for the further development of the Alexa language assistant and the smart Echo speakers.
An Amazon spokesman in Munich did not want to say whether the wave of layoffs will also reach the Amazon development center for artificial intelligence in Berlin. Here programmers write algorithms for the Amazon hardware. The Amazon development center in Aachen for speech recognition could theoretically also be affected by the job cuts.
137,000 vacancies in Germany
But if IT experts from Amazon or other tech companies in Germany lose their jobs, they shouldn’t remain unemployed for long. Because the shortage of IT specialists in the German economy has worsened. According to the Bitkom digital association, the number of vacancies last year rose by almost 43 percent to 137,000. This means that the situation on the IT job market is even more tense than in the pre-Corona year of 2019. At that time, 124,000 vacancies for IT experts could not be filled. The corona pandemic had slightly alleviated the shortage of skilled workers in 2020 and 2021.
The Bitkom investigation only records the vacancies in the companies. But authorities and organizations are also urgently looking for programmers and other IT experts.
Bitkom President Achim Berg spoke of a structural shortage of skilled workers when presenting the figures. “The shortage of IT experts is becoming increasingly difficult for companies and will increase dramatically in the coming years.” Berg pointed to the fact that many professionals from the boomer generation are retiring and at the same time significantly fewer young people with IT qualifications are entering the labor market.
The lack of computer scientists and other IT experts will also not be able to be compensated significantly by the dismissed employees of the tech companies. “We don’t see any trend that could noticeably close the existing gap.”
More skilled workers from abroad
“The shortage of skilled workers is becoming the main obstacle to digital transformation,” complained Berg. He campaigned for targeted poaching of IT experts from Russia and Belarus. According to the Bitkom survey, a good third (37 percent) of companies with vacancies in IT are willing to hire IT specialists from Russia or Belarus, provided they have passed an official security check beforehand. In fact, only one percent of the companies hired IT experts from these two countries. “In total, there is a potential of 59,000 positions that could be filled with IT professionals from Russia and Belarus.”
In the survey, 9 out of 10 companies (88 percent) asked politicians to do more to promote the immigration of skilled workers and to remove bureaucratic obstacles. For example, it is superfluous to require proof of German language skills from foreign IT specialists upon entry, said Berg. “The language of the experts is English anyway.”