Week 8: IT professionals in Estonia

This week's topic is IT professionals in Estonia. As the word "professional" can be defined in many different ways and the definition varies from person to person, for simplicity, in this blog I'll focus on IT professionals who have some sort of an IT degree, although there are a lot of professionals that don't have any sort of a degree.

In the last 20 years, the demand for IT professionals hasn't decreased, already at the start of the millennium we were lacking in specialists in the field and we still are now, as the demand increases with the rapid growth of IT.

The following graph is from a presentation that one of our lectors - Ago Luberg - gave at both the 2020 and 2019 IT-ametite päev or IT-career day. It's a summary based on a research done in 2019, with the purpose of finding out what the future of IT in Estonia is.

Prognosis of the demand for people in IT for the next 10 years.

The blue bubbles represent the number of people who on average graduate with some sort of an IT career in Estonia, and the yellow ones represent the number of professionals actually needed in that field (white bubbles represent the gap between the demand and supply of the workers). Under each one of the yellow bubbles, we see either a red or a purple bubble with the specific field name, reds representing degrees that in general require a university degree, and purple ones requiring a vocational education degree.

There are some exceptions, but in general, Estonia is lacing IT professionals that pursue higher education. The average IT professional in Estonia doesn't have high enough of an education to satisfy the needs of employers and we have an excess of IT people that don't have any degree or they have some basic vocational education IT degree. On average, every single year we need about 1580 new workers in the IT field in Estonia, 1125 with a higher education degree and 455 with a vocational education degree. In theory, we should have enough people as 2600 people on average annually start school in an IT field yet only 1150 manage to graduate with only 600 being from uni.

Furthermore, not all of the graduates are eligible for hire, as they might still be lacking in soft skills, that are sometimes hard to provide by schools, or they might be lacking in other qualities like motivation to constantly keep up to date and learn about the innovations in the field. As one of my close relatives who works as a recruiter in a cybersecurity software firm has said, even if they find a person who has a degree and all of the required technical skills, more often than not they don't get hired or get fired due to lack of social skills and ability to work in a team. Based on my studies in TalTech, I can see that the university is making efforts to teach us how to communicate and work as a team and hopefully we can see a change in the field in the near future. 

To summarize, more and more is expected from the average IT guy, as the field is rapidly growing and people need to specialize more on ascertain aspect of IT to stay relevant and compete with one another. That's why employers are demanding higher education degrees from people, to distinguish the actual professionals from people who have surface-level knowledge.