Ireland ranked as popular destination for international tech workers

New research by global job site Indeed for technology investment company Atomico’s State of European Tech Report 2019 has shown that Ireland remains a popular choice for foreign jobseekers looking to work in tech.

The research examined data across twelve countries to show trends in the tech labour market from 2017 to 2019. By looking at searches such as ‘software engineer’, ‘programmer’ and ‘web developer’ the research showed what countries are most popular for cross-border or domestic searches.

Ireland has maintained strong interest from those overseas looking for tech jobs, with 22% of searches for Irish tech jobs coming from abroad. It was the second most popular location for tech job searches from the US, after the UK where interest has remained strong despite the Brexit risk. Germany, France and The Netherlands were also in the top five destinations for US tech workers.

Tech jobs make up a large proportion of overall job searches in Ireland, with these searches accounting for 6,847 searches per million (fig. 1). This marks a growth of 25% since 2017. The breakdown of Irish searches suggests that the majority (79%) of tech workers based here are looking to stay put, with 9% searching for tech jobs in the US, 10% in Europe and 2% in the rest of the world (fig. 2).

Economist with Indeed Pawel Adrjan said “As Ireland approaches full employment it is increasingly reliant on jobseekers from overseas to fill the growing need for tech workers. We have learnt from this data that 43% of software engineer roles posted are classed as hard to fill, remaining open for more than sixty days. This is up 3% from last year and is likely to continue as the Irish labour market continues to tighten.”

Italy had the highest share of overall tech job searches, accounting for 7,340 of searches per million. Belgium had the lowest overall searches of the countries examined at 3,038 per million, but showed signs of fast growth, with searches nearly doubling over the past two years.