Currently, one in seventeen people in the Dutch labor market is an IT professional. In ten years, this has nearly doubled. At the current growth rate of nearly seven percent per year, by 2030, one in ten of the labor force will be an IT professional. That said, the battle for salaried and temporary IT professionals, self-employed and employed by secondment companies, is in full swing. Sourcing pressure - the percentage approached at least once a quarter - is unprecedented at nearly 65 percent, especially given the 37.6 percent average for the entire workforce
IT workers gone mainstream
Analysis by HR tech service provider HeadFirst Group and labor market data specialist Intelligence Group shows that by September 2022, the demand for salaried IT professionals (25,000) will be almost eight times greater than the demand for IT professionals (3,000). Geert-Jan Waasdorp, director and founder of Intelligence Group, says: "IT professionals have lost their special place in the labor market. The field is no longer a niche, but an integral part of business operations. To have IT knowledge properly embedded in the organization, more IT professionals are needed on a permanent basis. Supplemented by temporary IT professionals, who bring specific IT knowledge."
As a result of this rising demand, the occupational group is classified as the tightest in the UWV's stress indicator - the number of vacancies open divided by the number of people receiving unemployment benefits for less than six months. Despite the number of IT workers increasing by 6.9 percent year on year
Recruiting IT professionals remains difficult
Currently 580 thousand people work within IT occupations. The part that is employed has an extremely low labor market activity of 6.8 percent. Compared to the entire Dutch labor force, this is about half (11.5 percent). The proportion of IT workers with permanent jobs who are not looking for new work at all in the second quarter of 2022 is 42.7 percent. Just over half (50.5 percent) are latently - or not actively - looking and only 6.8 percent are actively looking. The labor market activity of IT professionals is more mobile: the number of active job seekers is 22.4 percent, 46.9 percent are latently looking and 30.7 not at all.
Marion van Happen, CEO HeadFirst Group, explains, "There is increasing competition among organizations to get the attention of latent job and assignment seekers. With the use of labor market communication, the emphasis is placed on selling the vacancy or assignment and the job or client. Salary and other benefits have become hygiene factors, the content and relevance of the work are now the critical recruitment factors."
On Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 10 a.m., the survey findings will be shared in a webinar. You can register via the Intelligence Group website. After that, the full Talent Monitor will be made available at hfgroup.headfirst.group.