Romania had almost 230,000 people employed as Information and Communication Technology (IT&C) specialists in 2014, some 23% more compared to 2011, according to the European Union’s statistics office Eurostat. Romania thus ranked 9th in the EU based on the total number of IT&C specialists, surpassing the Czech Republic, Belgium, Hungary, and Austria, among others.

However, the percentage of IT&C specialists in the total number of employees in Romania was 2.7%, under the EU average of 3.7%. The highest percentage of IT&C specialists was in Finland, where 6.7% of all employees work in this sector, followed by Sweden (6%), and Luxembourg (5.1%).

Romania’s western neighbor Hungary had 4.9% of its workforce employed in the IT&C sector and the Czech Republic had 4.1% while Poland had about 3% of its employees working as IT&C specialists.

Greece, Lithuania, and Bulgaria had the lowest rates of IT&C specialists in the total number of employees, of under 2%.

In the EU, nearly 8 million persons were employed in 2014 as IT&C specialists, 1.15 million more than in 2011. The UK and Germany had by far the highest numbers of people working in this sector, close to 1.5 million each, followed by France, with 914,000.

This profession is largely made up of men, accounting in 2014 for more than 8 IT&C specialists out of 10 employed in the EU (81.9%). It also employed mainly highly educated people, with more than half the specialists in the EU having a tertiary education level, according to Eurostat.

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editor@romania-insider.com