EU Electronics Job Opportunities Resist any Pandemic Downturn

One of the commercial aspects of the living through the coronavirus pandemic has been the loss of jobs and the diminishing number of career opportunities, the latter situation impacting heavily on young people. And the European job market amidst COVID refuses to face a downturn. 

Because of this, I was interested to read some analysis that took a European-wide perspective on technology jobs and work opportunities in the electronics industry and the results of the analysis were very positive.

What the survey clearly demonstrated is that electronics professionals are in high demand throughout Europe and, in addition to that, technology career opportunities are plentiful. What’s more, despite the impact of a novel Coronavirus in COVID-19, EU job opportunities continue to thrive in the electronics industry.

Understandably, the prolific evolution of electronically enabled innovations feeds the demand for people with the right technical skills but as with any engineering discipline, there will always be a league table relative to the job opportunities available.

The analytical study was performed by Prolifics Testing, a consultancy specialising in software testing services and industry-accredited software testing training courses.

Let’s take a look at the methodology behind the Prolifics Testing study but before that here’s a taster of what the survey unearthed.

The most job opportunities in Europe turned out to be vacancies for artificial intelligence engineers in Italy where there were close to 5000 career opportunities. It was also the top electronics-related job in Romania although in that country there were fewer vacancies with a total of 350 being available.

AI engineers can command high salaries in Europe with a starting level of €34K rising to €78K per annum. Particularly during a pandemic, these numbers are high.

Before looking at some of the other survey results, let's explore how were these statistics were obtained.

The Methodology Behind the Prolifics Testing Study

Prolifics Testing studied 25 technology jobs during the analysis. These included; data analyst, web developer, software developer, data scientist, software engineer, java developer, data engineer, python developer, PHP developer, network administrator, system administrator, systems engineer, machine learning, development engineer, business intelligence analyst, mobile developer, cloud engineer, applications engineer, AI engineer, AI architect, cloud administrator, network security architect, network security engineer, network security administrator and cybersecurity engineer.

Using an EU job search engine each of the technology positions were searched to establish how many new jobs had been flagged up in a two-week period. The job which returned the highest number of vacancies was then ranked as the highest demand technology job in that country.

Another section of the study looked closer to home and considered the ten technology jobs British electronics engineers are keen on.

Using the same 25 technology jobs Prolifics Testing used the analytics SEO tool Ahrefs and inserted each job title name into the software to discover how many times on average British citizens are searching for that specific job role each month. Following analysis of the data, these were graded to indicate the most searched technology jobs in the UK.

Also, studied was the top ten programming languages that British citizens are keen to learn?

To discover this the company identified thirteen of the most popular programming languages which include; Python, SQL, Java, JavaScript, C++, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, R, Scala, Ruby and Swift.

Once again the SEO tool Ahrefs was used and each programming language name was inserted into the software with the word’s Course, Tutorial and Learning included. The number of online search results for all three unravelled how many times on average British citizens enquired about each programming language. Following analysis, these were also listed and ranked to decipher which programming languages British people were most keen to learn.

So what about the results? Firstly, Britain was home to the second most in-demand job across Europe with 3,759 vacancies for the role of a systems engineer.

Indeed, the requirement for systems engineers was the most in-demand role across six EU countries. Despite having only a small fraction of the job vacancies available in the UK, the role of a systems engineer proved to be the most in-demand technology job in the following countries:

• Switzerland (555 vacancies)
• Turkey (499 vacancies)
• France (268 vacancies)
• Finland (47 vacancies)
• Sweden (125 vacancies).

EU Salaries for Electronics Careers

Salary-wise, systems engineers get paid very well with the average range of salaries across Europe ranging from €42K to €87k per annum.

Poland had the third-highest demand for any technology role in Europe with nearly 2000 opportunities for Java developers. Java Developers were also very sought after in Russia with nearly 600 vacancies available.

System administrators in Germany are in high demand. As well as being the fourth most in-demand job across Europe, Germany displayed 1600 vacancies. The requirement for that skill was particularly high in Germany rather than any other European country.

Prolifics Testing found that six EU countries were looking for software engineers and were most sought after in Austria, Holland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Norway with Holland having the largest number of vacancies.

So there are plenty of electronics-related vacancies in Europe, but which ones are the job seekers really after?

Prolifics Testing analysed Google Search volume data to predict which ten technology jobs British engineers were most interested in.

The highest demand was in data analysis with jobs in that area searched nearly 8000 a month. Web development was the second most sought after job in the UK accumulating an impressive average of 2,800 monthly searches. Shortly behind and in the third position was the role of a software developer with an average monthly search of 2,600.

The data also revealed that developer jobs of all types were the most searched for roles amongst British citizens with Web, Java, Software, Python and PHP Developer roles all in the top ten.

Paradoxically, despite the UK being home to the largest quantity of vacancies for systems engineers the analysis found that the title failed to score a place in the ten most desired technology roles.

Which programming languages are UK applicants most Interested in learning? 

Prolifics Testing’s survey discovered that Python was the most popular programming language by far with learning Python searched 18,400 times on average each month on Google.

In second place was SQL with 5,250 search queries monthly. Meanwhile, Java and JavaScript scored third and fourth place, both with over 4000 monthly searches.

Rounding off the top five programming languages that British citizens most want to become proficient in was C++, a language which caters for all levels, with an average monthly search volume of 3,600.