31% of the digital talent that Barcelona attracts is from abroad
Barcelona’s digital ecosystem attracts more talent from abroad than ever before. A third of the technology professionals working in the city come from other cities. Specifically, they come from London (11%), Madrid (10%), Buenos Aires (3%), Sao Paulo (2%) and Valencia (2%), among other cities.
They are data from the new report Overview of digital talent, published yesterday by Barcelona Digital Talent. According to this body integrated into the Mobile World Capital foundation, the trend has accelerated after overcoming the mobility restrictions of the pandemic. In fact, half of the jobs created in Barcelona during 2021 – around 4,700 – already come from outside the Catalan capital, compared to 1,700 in 2020 or 4,000 in 2019. With these data on the table, 2021 It has been the year with the most professionals outside the city, although as a percentage the weight has remained practically stable compared to the previous year.
The gender gap persists: only three out of ten technology workers are women
The report highlights that the most imported profiles from outside the city have been cybersecurity (40%) and application development (40%), due to the shortage and the rise in demand that began the previous year.
The report – which collects data from other sources such as Idescat, Eurostat, or the consulting firm Talent.up – also highlights that 10,500 new digital jobs were created in 2021, reaching a total of almost 100,000 in Catalonia as a whole. This is a growth of 12% compared to the previous year. Within the community, Barcelona continues to attract the vast majority of talent (95%), followed by the demarcations of Tarragona, Girona and Lleida.
As this newspaper has already published, the demand for technology professionals continued to be tense in 2021. For each offer that was published, there were barely 15 candidates available, while the usual thing in the rest of the sectors of the economy is that the availability is 60 professionals for each offer.
Another of the report’s conclusions is the persistence of the gender gap in the sector. In Europe as a whole, barely two out of ten professionals are women. In Spain, the difference is not so pronounced, since in both Madrid and Barcelona three out of ten workers in the digital sector are women. The report highlights the advances in the UX/UI design specialty, where parity has been achieved in the Catalan city.
According to Jordi Arrufí, director of Barcelona Digital Talent, one of the best ways to reduce the gender gap and increase the supply of professionals is to promote training. “It is necessary to promote the ICT vocation in schools and make it easier for people with other itineraries to be trained through ICT courses. retraining ”, Said the director yesterday. The Spanish academic offer is not among the best in Europe. The United Kingdom and Switzerland are the countries that have the reference universities. Here, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is the best valued university, followed by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Universitat de Barcelona and the Carlos III, from Madrid.