300,000 IT experts needed
While the need for Greece's digital transformation and companies' investments in technology have led to an explosion in demand for IT executives, the country does not employ enough workers in this sector. It even registers a negative lead compared to other European countries.
The inability of the education system to respond to the needs of the market, the brain drain during the crisis, the small size – compared to other countries – of the Greek IT market, and the obsolete production model of the country in previous decades, which has resulted in the underutilization of such specialist staff can explain, to some extent, the lack of specialists in the sector. However, this complicates the task of the Greek IT market, which is looking for around 300,000 executives in order to meet the challenge of the digital transformation by 2030, per a recent research by Deloitte on behalf of the Hellenic ICT Business Association (SEPE).
According to Eurostat, last year in Greece the percentage of workers in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector in relation to the total number of employees reached 2.5%, recording the lowest performance in the EU. Romania had the second lowest performance with 2.8%, followed by Poland with only 3.6% of workers in the country being employed in the sector. Conversely, the highest percentages of IT executives were recorded in Sweden (8.6%), Luxembourg (7.7%) and Finland (7.6%).
“We are looking for executives and it is difficult to find them, especially in areas of very high demand,” says Spyros Poulidas, who has been vice president of IBM in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region since March. What are these areas? “All those related to data, artificial intelligence, software aimed at automating processes, or people in these industries involved in sales and business development.”
According to him, “companies are now investing heavily in these items and as a result the demand is increasing. Also, the improvement in the country's economic activity is accompanied by investments in the technology sector, which shows that the number of jobs the market needs to support these investments is increasing.”