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

Job offers in the IT sector have gone down by around 25% compared to the same period of last year, recruitment companies say. It is challenging for the people now entering this sphere and aiming to make a career to find enough vacancies or to advance quickly - but it is not a question of unemployment, it is a question of fewer job offers and fewer options. It is a fact, however that there is no qualified IT expert left without a job and not finding another.

“This is the third significant crisis in the sector, when I myself started work in 2002 it was the time when the dot-com bubble was coming to an end,” says Emil Tanev, managing partner in a recruitment company in the IT sector.

“That crisis was not felt in Bulgaria in any way, the problem was connected with the rapid hiring of lots of people in the sector, most of all in the US. The huge number of investors led to major disappointment at the beginning of the century and a huge outflow of investments. Something we found out about mostly from the media, as in this country this was still a very young sphere at the time. Statistical data at the time showed that fewer than 30,000 specialists were hired in the country, whereas now they are more than 150,000 in number. During the 2008-2011 crisis there was also a certain slowdown, but because salaries in Bulgaria at the time were very different from salaries in Western Europe and the US, the sector was not impacted much. Many of the job positions that were being cut in Western Europe and the US continued to exist in Bulgaria so that this phenomenon actually had a positive effect on the sector today. What we are seeing now is something new for Bulgaria – we are seeing massive job cuts but that is only leading to a slowdown, not to some kind of catastrophe,” says Emil Tanev.

To advance your career in IT you need theoretical training, the right kind of education, but most of all practice. But many people enter the sector from similar branches like mathematics, geodesy or the humanities after retraining.

“Many people enter the sector because they have an interest, because they gain freedom and work flexibility,” Emil Tanev explains and adds:

“We conducted market research recently in order to probe into the tendencies in-depth, and to assist the processes of our clients with these data. What we ascertained was that out of almost 200 companies included in the survey, 44% continue to hire new staff annually and this is an indication of a comparatively healthy sector. Those are not the rates of 2-3 years ago, but staff are being hired and that is a positive tendency. Because staff shortages were huge in recent years the sector attracted lots of people who underwent retraining and that has had a positive effect. Because of the boom in online shopping during the pandemic and some time afterwards, this needed a huge infrastructure, there was over-hiring and many companies hired more people than they actually needed. This led to the current drop because of the previous superfluous hiring. This is making things more difficult for the people with less experience and for those who are yet to acquire qualification.”

More:

• IT sector in Bulgaria sees growth in employees, attracts specialists from abroad

Translated and posted by Milena Daynova

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