Digital professionals in Barcelona reach 130,000, but growth slows

BarcelonaBarcelona added 7,423 new digital professionals in 2024, representing a 6% increase, according to data from the 7th report.Digital Talent Overview, prepared by Mobile World Capital Barcelona and presented this Thursday. With this growth, the city now has 129,608 ICT specialists, representing 6% of the Catalan capital's workforce. According to the report, new jobs in Barcelona's digital sector are growing six times faster than the city's overall labor market, which registered an increase of 0.96% in 2024. Furthermore, it maintains that a third of professionals come from outside Catalonia, demonstrating the city's ability to attract talent but also its shortage.

The CEO of Mobile World Capital Barcelona, ​​​​Francesc Fajula, stated that "ICT professions have established themselves as a true economic and employment driver for Barcelona." In fact, since 2018, nearly 62,000 digital professionals have joined the workforce: "They have practically doubled." However, and in line with the global digital talent context, some slowdown is perceived: growth falls from 12.4% in 2023 to 6% in 2024. However, the talent base has doubled in six years and continues to increase above total employment. This slowdown in growth is explained, in part, by the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in companies. As Fajula explained, "in recruitment and distribution jobs, AI works very well, and companies are hiring fewer junior profiles but reinforcing the senior profile, to do more supervision," he noted.

The most notable growth is in the field of research (+9.6%), driven mainly by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and IT consulting firms (+9.5%). These figures indicate a reinforcement of specialized technological activity. start-upsHowever, they are the only segment with a negative variation, with an 11.9% drop in the demand for talent. "The start-ups "They've had a couple of years of funding issues, with a freeze on venture capital, which has led to fewer hires," Fajula explains.

The most sought-after talent

The demand for professionals in Barcelona is especially concentrated in web and application developers, as well as cloud services specialists (cloud), with a significant increase in the number of experts in Agile and Scrum programs. Regarding emerging technologies, the report highlights an increased need for professionals in sustainable computing (+166%), quantum computing (+74%), and 5G.

Likewise, as Jordi Arrufí, director of the digital talent area at MWCapital, explained, the profiles with the greatest shortage are concentrated in cybersecurity and the cloud, "and they are also the professions with the highest salaries and with the most professionals from outside Catalonia," he points out. In the case of cybersecurity, the foreign profile is close to 50%. Thus, Arrufí says that specialties such as cybersecurity (€61,200), artificial intelligence (€57,500) and cloud (€56,400) are the highest paid, coinciding with those with the greatest need for workers.

In fact, the average salary for digital professionals in Barcelona reached €48,600 per year in 2024, a 1.7% increase compared to the previous year's figures. Thus, the average salary for this sector in Barcelona is well above the average for Barcelona workers, which is €35,000 per year.