IBM Shared Services Centre in Slovakia (source: IBM)
After years of prosperity, Slovakia’s IT professionals are experiencing more challenging times. The dynamic growth of the sector during the pandemic has slowed down, leading to a reduced number of new job openings.
IT employers began reassessing priorities, cutting costs, and in some cases reducing recruitment efforts as early as last year – a trend most visible in shared service centres of companies such as Dell, IBM, AT&T, and Henkel.
Layoffs and a reduced number of new vacancies have resulted in significantly more applicants competing for a single position. As a result, securing a job in IT without specific skills has become noticeably harder than in the past.
For traditional IT companies that specialise in delivering complex information solutions to clients, the current situation offers a silver lining. These firms now have the opportunity to temper candidates’ inflated salary expectations.
Slovakia is not alone in seeing a downturn in IT hiring. The effects of economic slowdown and, to some extent, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) are also being felt abroad. Since the beginning of this year, more than 90,000 IT workers have been laid off globally, with projections suggesting this figure could reach a quarter of a million by the end of the year.
Whereas beginners once found it relatively easy to enter the IT field, today’s companies expect at least some practical experience, a strong interest in the field, ideally a university degree, and preferably a basic portfolio of personal projects – ideally hosted on GitHub – developed in the candidate’s free time.
