Skill needs in Aveiro: the voice of ITCE companies

During the months of April, May and June, the Labour Observatory research team inter-viewed representative companies from Aveiro in order to get to know their vision about their digitalization strategies. Inter-views also addressed their qualification/requalification needs, linked to those strategies, and aimed at the adoption and sustainability of new technologies.

Companies from the sector of ITCE highlighted the importance of software, hard-ware and firmware professionals. The level of quality of the formal training of these professionals is acknowledged as being of great quality in Aveiro. However, companies identify shortages in the supply of such professionals in the region. Still regarding soft-ware and hardware professionals, the companies highlighted special difficulties in fin-ding those who master specific and more recent programming languages (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Golang, Python or TensorFlow from Google).

This difficulty extends to finding professionals who can provide training in these areas. What makes this area of programming more complex, justifying the difficulties pointed out by companies, is the pace at which new programming languages appear on the mar-ket, often every six months. It was also pointed out in this context that competences such as adaptability or autonomous learning become essential to overcome this deficien-cy in the technical competence required of software developers. Therefore, companies have often identified the need for hybrid professionals, with technical competences of software and hardware as well as highligh-ted transversal competences of autonomous learning and communication as the most other needs highlighted include digital marketing competences and digital knowledge in the commercial areas, including competences for the development of new business models and internationalization, based on digitalisation.

Figure 1 shows the ranking of technical competences according to the vision of the companies in Aveiro surveyed by the Labour Observatory.

 The related occupations can be found in the ESCO -European Skills/ Competences, Qualifications and Occupations, it is important to point out that the ESCO it sometimes defines 2 or more occupations related to each technical competence. The ran-king of the technical competences pointed out as the most relevant for the regional market of Aveiro, puts the Software Developer at the top, followed by the AI and Machine learning Specialist and the Digital Marketing. The identification of these competences can be the great opportunity for a professional who wants to invest in his specialization, or in his training or requalification, either to stay in the same company or to start a new function in another company.