The State Of Tech Freelancing in The Netherlands: Number crunch
By Wietse Boersma, Recruiter.
This post first appeared on LinkedIn on the 21st of February 2020.
The Dutch software engineering job market has been, is and will be on fire. There are not nearly enough software engineers for the exploding demand. The Netherlands counted around 320 thousand professional software engineers in 2019, says the State of European Tech. A little LinkedIn ‘Boolean research’ tells me that 200 thousand software(-, deployment- and ‘OPS’) engineers are on the professional networking platform. This number does not differentiate between, for example, (years of) experience or education -- strengthening the notion that experienced and well-educated engineers are still very niche, thus hard to find.
The Dutch software engineering job market has been, is and will be on fire. There are not nearly enough software engineers for the exploding demand. The Netherlands counted around 320 thousand professional software engineers in 2019, says the State of European Tech. A little LinkedIn ‘Boolean research’ tells me that 200 thousand software(-, deployment- and ‘OPS’) engineers are on the professional networking platform. This number does not differentiate between, for example, (years of) experience or education -- strengthening the notion that experienced and well-educated engineers are still very niche, thus hard to find.
The discrepancy between supply and demand is only getting bigger. Robotisation, automation and digitalisation are some of the ‘culprits’, causing 50 percent of Dutch companies to have difficulty in finding tech personnel. Consequently, a 54 thousand deficit in IT is expected in 2020 in The Netherlands, says the Boston Consulting Group. It comes as little surprise that the majority of this deficit consists of software engineers. It looks unavoidable that, across the board, companies are becoming increasingly dependent on the services of ‘gig workers’ -- freelancers.
Dutchies are entrepreneurial types. The Netherlands had a total of 1.9 million companies in 2019. Of these 1.9 million companies, 1.2 million of them were freelancers. What’s more: this number has been increasing by about 50 thousand the last couple of years. Bizarrely, in 2013 the number of Dutch freelancers was ‘only’ 800 thousand. Of those 1.2 million freelancers, only 42 thousand are software engineers -- or so approximates the State of European Tech. A simple calculation leads to the conclusion that only 3.3 percent of all freelancers in the country are software engineers. My LinkedIn inquiry finds 27 thousand of those software engineering freelancers on LinkedIn. The Freelance Market Index (or FMI) concludes that although the economy is showing signs of shrinkage and the number of vacancies in The Netherlands across the board has decreased, the popularity of freelancing remains undiminished and keeps on increasing. Additionally, the leading platform for Dutch freelancers, Freelance.nl, estimates that approximately 60 percent of all freelance projects are IT-related and where 40 percent of all freelance projects is in software engineering or DevOps doctrines.
So although freelance software engineers make up only 3.3 percent of the entire freelancer population, 40 percent of all Freelance.nl jobs are in software engineering. It seems unavoidable, and only logical, for organisations to strategise and plan more towards freelancer attraction and retention.
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