How healthy is the IT sector today?

The world’s been through a LOT in the last 3 years. Together with every other industry really. We know the reasons for it all too well. Among the most impacted sectors out there is undoubtedly the IT sector. 

The global pandemic has changed the way people work forever and the energetic crisis, some of the highest inflation we’ve seen in years & the war, which noone seen coming or ever hoped for has put a lot of extra unnecessary pressure on everyone as well. From organizational structures, to investments and company budgets. On the other hand we’ve seen enormous amount of digitalization across all industries and the explosion of AI.

It’s a lot to absorb for anyone. But challenging times have always been here and they will be with us whether we like it or not. On the other hand tougher times always led to a lot of new innovations, new and better opportunities. 

Today, we’ll look into what the IT sector in particular looks like now and what are the challenges and opportunities in the near future. 

We wanted to see what’s the reality of the IT Sector today, so in March this year, we’ve done some internal research and here is what we’ve found out.  

Job market as we know it will change significantly: This will be caused mainly due to a decrease in interest and strategy venture capital. This trend started to show late last year across the US job market and we will see it creep into EU countries too. 

The most significant reason was of course the C word- Covid. It lasted a little over 2 years but had a massive impact on how companies had to restructure and rethink their operations. It of course overflowed into how they viewed investments, projects or even hiring of new staff. 

It took a lot of adjusting and readjusting for companies to make sure they come out of this pandemic still relatively strong and standing tall. 

Financial institutions have also tightened their rules when it comes to investments (e.g.: to startups) or other kinds of financial capital. Simply said: Borrowing money became a lot harder than once used to be.

Remote is the new normal

Apart from companies and investors becoming a lot more careful when it comes to making significant investments and banks & other financial institutions borrowing money for such investments, there are a few more trends that we noticed arising from our survey. 

There are overall less vacant positions being advertised from employers side, and those vacant ones are likely to be full time rather than contract based. 

Those looking for a job no longer have such high requirements and expectations from a job then in the pre Covid and pre inflation era. There is a lot lower fluctuation and a lower amount of startups or similar projects being created. 

As we have already mentioned above, the nature of how people work since the pandemic has also set a new trend. That trend is homeoffice/ full remote or hybrid models. Both of these models have received well over 50% from the senior participants. Hybrid model 55% and full remote model 57%, while onsite model only 47%. Medior positions were a lot more indecisive. All three options received just above 30%.

Most of the vacant positions are likely to be for senior experts (53%) rather than medior positions (36%) and juniors (11%). 

When it comes to the actual positions, the lucky money star is shining on BE developers a lot brighter as their compensations are significantly higher and more attractive than those for FE Developers and QA’s.

What will the (near) future hold?

Our predictions are based mainly of the US data and our internal survey, but we think, this will to some extent, start happening in Europe too with some delay. The first changes will likely become noticeable somewhere between the second quarter of 2023 through to first quarter of 2024.

The most noticeable changes will be: less new projects being executed, less investments into software innovations, the job market situation getting stabilized and less workforce fluctuations.

So as you can see it luckily isnt all doom & gloom. There are some good news appearing such as the stabilization of the job market and also the new working model as it will save companies significant amount of resources. They can then use those saved resources and invest them back into their staff and maybe even some exciting innovations.