The IT sector attracts thousands of people, but the market selects the most motivated and experienced specialists

IT is one of the leading sectors in terms of salary growth and interest from job seekers in Bulgaria. Before the pandemic, all kinds of experts were hired, regardless of their expertise or practical skills, but now preference is given to those with better qualifications and more practice.

Job offers in the IT sector have fallen by about 25% compared to the same period last yearsay recruitment companies. For those entering the field today and looking to make a career, finding enough vacancies or getting promoted quickly is a challenge – but it’s not about unemployment, it’s about fewer job offers and fewer options. The fact is, however, that there is no qualified IT expert who doesn’t have a job and wouldn’t find another one.

“This is the third major crisis in the industry. When I started working in 2002, the dot-com bubble was just coming to an end,” says Emil Tanev, managing partner at an IT recruiting firm.

“This crisis was not felt in Bulgaria in any way, the problem was related to the rapid hiring of many people in the sector, primarily in the USA. The huge number of investors led to great disappointment at the beginning of the century and a huge outflow of investments. We learned about this mainly from the media, because in this country it was still a very young sphere at that time. Statistics from that time showed that less than 30,000 specialists were employed in the country, while now there are more than 150,000. During the crisis of 2008-2011 there was also a certain slowdown, but since salaries in Bulgaria at that time were significantly different from those in Western Europe and the USA, this sector did not suffer much. Many jobs that were being eliminated in Western Europe and the USA continued to exist in Bulgaria, so this phenomenon had a positive impact on the sector today. What we are seeing now is something new for Bulgaria – we are witnessing massive job cuts, but it is only leading to a slowdown, not to some kind of catastrophe,” says Emil Tanev.

To advance in IT, you need theoretical training, the right kind of education, but above all, practice. However, many people enter the sector from similar fields, such as mathematics, surveying or humanities after retraining.

“Many people enter this sector because they are interested in it, because they gain freedom and flexibility of work,” explains Emil Tanev and adds:

“We recently conducted market research to dig deeper into trends and help our clients with this data. We found that of the nearly 200 companies we surveyed, 44% were still hiring new staff annually, which indicates a relatively healthy sector. These are not the rates of 2-3 years ago, but people are being hired and this is a positive trend. As labour shortages have been huge in recent years, the sector has attracted a lot of people who have been retrained, which has had a positive impact. Due to the boom in online shopping during the pandemic and some time since, this has required a huge amount of infrastructure, there has been over-hiring and many companies have hired more people than they actually needed. This has led to the current decline due to previous unnecessary hiring. This has made life difficult for those with less experience and those who have not yet gained qualifications.”

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Translated and published by Milena Daynova

Photos: Pixabay, Pexels, archive

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