Spanish Information Technology’s future is looking promising and growing stronger than ever since the depths of the pandemic. Upcoming regulations and investments will allow for a boost in new technologies.

Investing in innovation

2021 was the year that allowed for this thriving growth. In the first half of this year, Spanish start-ups hauled €1.9B in venture capital investment. This means a 3.8x raise since 2020. By the end of this year, the sectors which received the most funding were Proptech, logistics/delivery, and fintech.

One step in the right direction is the so-called Start-up Law which will be ready in 2022. The act’s goals are to increase growth in start-up investments, attract and retain talent, promote scalability, and inject innovation into the public sector, finally making a breakthrough. Some of the news include reform of stock option, raising the tax exemption on income from €12.5k to €50k a year, and reducing corporation tax in a business’s first four years. These are designed to help attract talent to the country.

According to big IT companies, the next investments will allow for the definitive impulse of new technologies such as 5G connectivity, quantum computing, A.I., the Cloud, cybersecurity, and the digitalization of SMEs.
The funds coming from the EU will impact the success of two key factors. The first is to be able to count on the necessary tech talent to carry it out. The second, and no less important, is the commitment to invest in disruptive innovation.

Investing on talent

By the end of 2021, the labour market emerged from the critical situation caused by the pandemic and created over 500.000 jobs. Especially for the groups that were most affected by the health crisis, such as young people, women, and unskilled workers.
According to Computerworld and the data gathered from the interviews with several Human Resources directors, the categories currently in the highest demand in Spain are Sales (26.34%), Engineering (24.19%), Technology (23.12%), Marketing (9.14%) and Administration, Finance and Legal (4.30%).

In this sense, the number of employees in the information technology (IT) industry in Spain has been increasing exponentially. For 2022 the estimated growth is about 9.2%.
Roles, such as data scientist, system administrator or architect, DevOps developer, or IT director are among the fastest-growing jobs with salary bands that exceed 30.000€ per year. On some occasions, it can exceed 70.000 euros, depending on the experience of the professional.

One other thing that matters to the salary range, is the location of the position. Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao register the highest salaries, while in Valencia, Seville, Malaga, and Zaragoza, salaries are usually 10% lower on average.
The IT sector remained the one that offered the highest salaries in Spain in 2021 and ranks fifth with 198.891 job offers, 20% more than the previous year, of which 83.898 are reserved for those who work in programming.

Investing in gender equality

One in three women in the tech field says they experience gender bias in their workplace. In 2022, women held only 26.7%of tech-related jobs. There are significantly fewer women in the tech industry, but not because they do not want to. Almost half of these women state that they got into this sector because of the compensation. Other reasons were job security, flexibility, and a passion for the industry.

With the pandemic and the opening of more tech job vacancies, a new opportunity arose for women. Since mid-2021, Spain became a global leader in gender equality by adopting two new decrees. The Equality Plan Decree and Equal Pay Decree aim to alleviate the gender pay gap in companies, ensure equal treatment and opportunities for employees, and eliminate any discrimination based on gender.

The industry is changing rapidly to adapt to new tendencies and companies must try and keep up to remain relevant.