IT: High unemployment rate for skilled workers

For many years, the job as a software developer was considered to be future-proof. This narrative now seems to be slowly starting to crack. A look at recent statistics from the Federal Employment Agency makes this clear. Unemployment in the IT sector has risen significantly recently. We are talking about an increase of an impressive 31 percent.

After the rise comes the fall

The whole thing came about after our colleagues at Golem.de interviewed labor market researcher Anja Bauer on the subject. She works at the Institute for Employment Research. This is an institute belonging to the Federal Employment Agency. The astonishing thing about the figures presented by Bauer is the sudden drop. In her answer, she states that the market was still growing by eight percent in 2022. By 2023, the increase in the software development and programming sector had already shrunk. One small indication of increasing unemployment among IT specialists is certainly the decline in job vacancies in the sector. However, according to the researcher, this can be attributed to simple mechanisms of the labor market, which reflect a combination of redundancies and new vacancies.

Of course, the mere unemployment figures are far more meaningful. And there is no denying that the number of unemployed people in the IT sector has definitely increased. A rise of a whopping 31 percent can be seen here. The general economic situation certainly plays a role here. However, according to Bauer, the increase cannot simply be attributed to a general process on the labor market. Rather, this increase is significantly higher than in other sectors. A decline in job vacancies also shows that it has become more difficult for the unemployed to find a new job. The first parallels with the USA can be seen here, where the tech sector has been experiencing waves of redundancies for many months. It is currently being speculated, for example, that a wave of redundancies is imminent at Tesla.

Nevertheless, shortages in IT

However, a high unemployment rate coupled with declining job advertisements apparently does not mean that the German labor market is saturated with IT specialists. Quite the opposite. As Bitkom has now made clear, there are probably almost 150,000 unfilled vacancies for IT experts across Germany. Here, too, there is a parallel to the rising unemployment rate. Of course, you have to ask yourself how a rising unemployment rate can match the rising number of unfilled vacancies. According to Bitkom, this is probably mainly due to salary expectations that are too high in some cases, as well as insufficient qualifications. Unemployed IT specialists must therefore either accept a lower salary or venture into further training.