Over the next years, finding personnel will continue to be problematic for the Dutch technology and IT industry, according to a labor market survey published by the Research Center for Education and the Labor Market (ROA). The shortage is caused by a combination of employees quitting work altogether (retirement, illness and so on) and new positions being created with an insufficient influx of recent graduates. In the technology sector, in particular, many positions require very specific education, making it harder to find the right people for the job.
Although the labor market shortage in technology has been a cause for concern for a few years already, it’s a reversal of a long-term trend. Over the past twenty years, the number of available technical positions has actually been falling, on average. Perhaps because of this, wages have barely grown. In contrast, employment and wages in IT have surged.
The shortage is present across all educational levels: MBO graduates through masters generally won’t have much trouble finding a job. Reversely, employers will obviously have a ‘big’ problem finding staff. Only in healthcare, the situation is worse, with ROA calling the labor market bottleneck in that sector “very big”.