More than new customers, the first concern of digital service companies is finding workers. In its half-yearly study “Trends and perspectives”, published in December 2023, Numeum, the professional organization of digital companies in France, notes that two thirds of digital service companies complain of a shortage of resources, while the “lack of business opportunities” is only cited by 44% of them.
For five years, driven by its growth, the sector has experienced unprecedented wage pressure. “Employment in digital professions grew by more than 6% per year between 2018 and 2021, almost three times more than the average observed for other sectors”underlines the Montaigne Institute, in an “action note” published in May 2023.
Of the 945,000 jobs available in digital professions, in the broad sense, in 2022, nearly 10% of them were not filled. And in view of the forecasts, the liberal think tank fears that this “a brake on the development of our businesses and our public administrations” does not become “a structural problem”.
If there are some signs of deceleration in growth appeared in 2023, this imbalance is likely to last. IT will be the economic sector that creates the most jobs by 2030, warn France Stratégie and the management of research, studies and statistics in their study “What professions in 2030”, published in March 2022.
By this time, France will need 115,000 additional IT engineers, an increase of 26% compared to 2019. But the 156,000 young beginners trained by 2030 will not be enough to cover these job creations and the 75 000 retirements. There will still be a shortage of 34,000 computer scientists, approximately twice what France is capable of training each year.
Difficult to convince girls
Engineering schools, where the majority of young computer scientists come from, feel this tension. “The average job search time of our Ensimag graduates [Ecole nationale supérieure d’informatique et de mathématiques appliquées] is only three days”, underlines Emmanuel Maître, vice-president in charge of relations with companies at the public engineering school institute Grenoble INP-UGA, to which Ensimag depends.
“The aspiration is such that some of our students do not complete the common core of training to accept an internship or a job”regrets Olivier Crouzet, director of educational coordination at 42, the school founded by Xavier Niel (shareholder of World individually), whose Parisian premises are under construction to double their surface area.
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