More money, better benefits, greater flexibility to work when and where they like: Europe’s tech workers, in tandem with their global counterparts, have a laundry list of demands going into 2024.
A recent Gallup poll found that “blenders,” aka those who prefer a job where work and life are more blended throughout the day, make up 55% of the professional workforce.
So when it comes to the hottest roles in tech next year, first and foremost—especially for knowledge workers who aren’t people managers and who are engaged in deep technical work such as coding—jobs where remote or fully flexible options are on offer will be top of the most-wanted list.
After a year of uncertainty and upheaval in the European tech industry, where, according to HR tech firm Ravio, startups cut hiring by 30-50% this year, and pay increases are down by almost 50% compared to 2022, what workers also want is some optimism around their futures. Next year? A hot job is a secure job.
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Additionally, the report found that over the next 12 months, European workers will place a premium on benefits. Their top five include private health insurance (54%), cycle-to-work schemes, and home office allowances (both 51%), with professional development funds (45%) and mental health service subscriptions (44%) rounding out the list of most-wanted.
While great perks and benefits have long been a part of a wider tech remuneration package, it’s clear that when it comes to extras, it is tangible benefits that will win out next year over nice-to-haves such as free coffees or in-office gaming consoles.
When it comes to actual roles that will be most in-demand in 2024, Deloitte’s most recent annual Tech Trends report has some insights.
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The industrial metaverse
Where last year Deloitte championed the rise of the metaverse, those working in the industry know this didn’t quite happen, and Meta looks set to see $50bn in operating losses this year as a result.
Just launched, however, is Meta’s new standalone AI-powered web tool called Imagine, an image generator akin to OpenAI’s DALL-E, which allows users to generate up to four images for free.
Deloitte’s report agrees that “we’ve seen some of those metaverse capabilities progress in new directions.” It highlights spatial technologies, which are starting to find uses in industrial applications, as an area in which we’ll see jobs increase.
Digital twins, spatial simulation, augmented work instructions, and collaborative digital spaces that make factories and businesses safer and more efficient are just four job opportunity areas that look promising for next year.
Generative AI
One of the biggest pieces of news both in and out of the tech industry, “few technologies have ever debuted to such fanfare,” the Tech Trends report’s authors say of generative AI. Its adoption has been wide and rapid, in particular around the take-up of Open AI’s ChatGPT.
As a result, AI has come under wider scrutiny, and EU legislators have recently settled on a provisional deal to advance the bloc’s AI Act, which will provide guardrails for AI technologies, like LLMs and facial recognition.
While a report from Goldman Sachs warned that AI could substitute up to 25% of current work, the company also found that it could raise global GDP by 7%. In its 2023 Future of Jobs Report, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says that 23% of jobs are expected to change by 2027, with 69 million new jobs created, and 83 million eliminated.
That represents a net loss, and other recent data has found that 44% of companies expect layoffs to occur in 2024 due to new AI capabilities.
However, the adoption and interest in AI will create a demand for jobs in the arena, and the WEF points to job growth for AI model and prompt engineers, interface and interaction designers, AI content creators, data curators and trainers, as well as ethics and governance specialists.
As the pace of digitalisation accelerates, and more and more companies are moving their capabilities to the cloud, the importance of harnessing that data becomes ever more vital. It is now a business imperative to not only gather big data in real-time but to then use it to enable accurate and fast decision-making.
Big data analytics is expected to be one of the biggest drivers of job growth over the next five years, according to the WEF.
According to 2024 predictions by Justice Erolin, CTO of BairesDev, “next year, clients will prioritise data projects, emphasising strong infrastructures and analytics, with rising demand for AI-driven and cost-effective DevOps and infrastructure capabilities.”
As a result, roles for data scientists, analysts, engineers and architects will be in demand in 2024 and beyond, as will related careers for machine learning engineers, and business intelligence professionals.
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