In January 2022, TalentUp issued a report in collaboration with TicJob, an IT employment portal. This report, which is entirely written in Spanish, provides an overview of 10 IT job positions in the top Spanish cities when talking about IT hubs. It examines supply and demand by city and by position. It compares the number of companies by location. Moreover, it provides a comparison of average salaries for each role in each market.

Which positions are more requested? Does supply meet demand?

Both DevOps engineers and PHP developers are highly demanded and not that popular among professionals. For someone interested in joining the IT talent market, these two roles would be interesting specializations to fulfil. 

On the other end, there are 10 professionals per offer who specialize in system administration or software architecture. The ratio of professionals per offer goes up to 20 for security engineers. And, not quite as extreme as that but still relevant, there is four times more supply than demand for data scientists and quality assurance engineers.

Which are the main tech hubs in Spain?

When analyzed by cities, Madrid ranks as the one with more professionals for the positions studied (there are approximately twice as many as in Barcelona). Nevertheless, in Madrid, there are just 13% more offers than in Barcelona. 

Both cities have far more professionals available than are needed. In Madrid, the supply is 3.5 times the demand; in Barcelona, it is “just” two times.

After these two great powers, the number of professionals in Málaga, Valencia, and Seville is quite similar. Nonetheless, in Valencia, there are twice the offers of either Málaga or Seville. Bilbao and Zaragoza also have more than 1500 professionals each, but the number of job openings there is already really small.

The small difference in demand between the two biggest cities is curious, given that in Madrid there are twice as many companies employing these positions as in Barcelona (60k in the capital versus 30k in Barcelona). Talking about the number of companies, the rest of the Spanish cities all have less than a thousand businesses there, except for Valencia, where 1885 are installed. The drop is heavier for companies than for professionals and offers.

Salary benchmarking of the Spanish IT talent market

On average, the highest salaries are found in Barcelona, closely followed by Madrid. In fact, salaries in Barcelona are 9.5% higher than in Madrid. The rest of the IT hubs have similar standardized salaries, with A Corua and Oviedo being particularly low.

Sevilla is an interesting city since it is one of the places where PHP developers are better paid and one of the worst for .Net developers, data scientists, or software engineers. Valencia and Zaragoza’s cases are similar: they both are at the top for Java developers but last for systems administrators and software engineers, respectively. Especially with system administrators in Valencia, there is a huge difference. It also demonstrates that salaries in Bilbao are generally average, with the exception of DevOps engineers, who are paid the least in Spain.

The software architect is the highest-paid position, followed by the security engineer and the DevOps engineer. All cities follow this trend except for the DevOps engineers in Bilbao, one of the least remunerated there. 

The lowest salaries are assigned to quality assurance engineers. The best city for them is Barcelona: where they earn 13,750€ more than the average. Moreover, Java developers, systems administrators, and PHP developers also are in the lowest ranks. In particular, Java developers are the worst off in Barcelona by a huge margin. In opposition to this, systems administrators are the third-most-paid position in Madrid.

Companies must be aware of the various IT hubs, their specific demands, and the benchmark salaries. Being aware of talent market trends allows businesses to customize and optimize their strategies.

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