2023 was a record year for the incorporation of digital talent in Barcelona with 13,500 new digital professionals
2023 was a record year for the incorporation of digital talent in Barcelona with 13,500 new digital professionals
Digital. The Digital Talent Overview 2024 report states that in Barcelona, there are 122,185 digital professionals.
This data features in the sixth edition of the report Digital Talent Overview 2024, produced by Mobile World Capital Barcelona, to analyse the impact of the digital talent gap.
The Digital Talent Overview 2024 report states that in Barcelona, there are 122,185 digital professionals, 13,500 of which joined the digital labour market in 2023, representing an increase of 12.4% on the previous year in the supply of tech talent in the city.
In 2023, 34,192 job offers were published in Barcelona. While the number of offers published by the city’s tech hubs increased by 37%, emerging companies advertised 34% fewer vacancies than in 2022, which correlates with the almost 50% fall in total investment captured. Nevertheless, demand for professionals was down 13% this year despite being twice as high as in 2018, when there were 15,865 offers.
Consolidated and emerging sectors and new professions
Among the consolidated technologies, web developers (8,908 offers) and app developers (2,554) were the most in-demand professionals in 2023. Cloud professionals experienced the highest growth in demand with regard to the number of job offers published (+20%), while the field of cybersecurity, with only three professionals per offer, is the discipline with the greatest shortage of professionals.
More than half of the digital talent is specialised in software development (35%) and user experience design (17%). With regard to emerging technologies, there is a high degree of variability in demand. In 2023, companies advertised 58% more vacancies for blockchain specialists than the previous year, while demand for 3D printing professionals fell by almost 60%. New specialities such as newspace, microprocessors, quantum technologies, and sustainable computing joined the list of emerging technologies, albeit with rather modest supply and demand figures.
In Barcelona, one in three digital professionals are women
In Barcelona, almost 35,000 women work in digital professions, accounting for 30.6% of the total. Although this is still a long way off parity, in the past five years, there has been an increase of more than 8 percentage points compared to 2018 (22%).
Digital marketing (57%) and UX/UI (45%) are the professions with the highest number of women. Cybersecurity (16%) and blockchains (18%) are at the other end of the scale.
In 2023, more than 5,000 foreign national professionals joined the workforce
One in three digital professionals in Barcelona comes from other places (33%). Cybersecurity (55%), app development (49%) and web development (35%) are the disciplines with the highest presence of foreign talent. London is the city where the highest number of ICTs professionals comes from (12.1%), followed, at a distance, by Lisbon (6.2%), Madrid (3.8%) and Buenos Aires (3.4%). In 2023, 5,111 new international digital professionals joined the workforce.
