Number of IT professionals in Poland
Area: Human Resources, IT
Relation to: Availability of human resources
Importance: Highest
Impact on revenues: High
Impact on costs: Medium
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Plenty of Talents
Gartner Survey shows that the global talent shortage is the top emerging risk facing organizations in recent years. Likewise, KPMG global tech report 2022 states that this phenomenon is the No 1 challenge complicating the adoption of digital technologies in modern economies. And Forbes, in its turn, reports although the end of COVID-19 has caused pandemic-related job shifts to slow down, talent shortages persist and millions of job openings are un-filled in Global North countries.
In this situation, one of the most important factors for Tech companies is to attract the best team members having both the required technical expertise and so-called soft skills. To achieve this goal (and usually also savings), such companies often decide to set up their engineering teams in other countries, and Poland is one of the best examples in this case. Today, there are thousands of businesses from around the world (mostly from Europe, North America, and the Middle East) that already opened their branches or created remote R&D teams in our country (check examples from various industries in our Success Stories section). Moreover, each month numerous new international technology giants, SMEs, and startups are opening their branches in Poland (the most interesting among those entries we present in the News section).
There are several main reasons why Poland is one of the best destinations in this case, and one of the most important is the fact that Poland has the biggest number of IT professionals in Central and Eastern Europe. This remains true although the exact number of IT professionals in Poland today is not known. The most recent official data from Eurostat mentioned 585,700 „ICT employees” (defined as „persons who have the ability to develop, operate and maintain ICT systems and for whom ICTs constitute the main part of their job”), but this number seems underestimated. The same Eurostat assessed the number of employees in a sector of ICT services in Poland in 2020 at 444,600 while a huge number of IT professionals work in other industries like banking, telecom etc. In our opinion, considering the continuous increase in employment in the area of ICT in recent years, which has been around 10% per year, the number of IT specialists in Poland is now at least 700,000 and is still growing rapidly.
Slightly more information can be found on the number of programmers working in Poland in recent years. According to the 2020 Dealroom.co and the Polish Development Fund report (download full report here), the number of Software Developers in Poland at the end of the second decade of the 21st century was as high as 401,000, almost three times as high as in Romania, which ranked second among the eastern EU countries (the report does not include Ukraine, a non-EU country which, according to other studies, ranked second in CEE, with about 35% fewer Software Developers than Poland).
Source: Polish and CEE tech ecosystem outlook by Dealroom.co and Polish Development Fund
In this case, however, the number of developers seems to be slightly overestimated, but not by much, since Poland’s position as a leader is also highlighted in other reports from previous years. For instance, Software Development in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Romania in 2019 said that in 2017 Poland had 255,000 Software Developers, and a similar estimate for 2017 can also be found in the Infoshare and Stack Overflow survey (see full article here). As Infoshare pointed out, already in those times, Poland was home to almost 25% of all Software Developers available in the entire CEE region.
Speaking of statistics, one interesting point is the fairly large number of women in the Polish IT industry. According to Geek Girls Carrots report (download the full report here) already in 2018 a total of 30% of specialists, engineers, and programmers in the industry were women. Remarkably, as specified by No Fluff Jobs Women in IT 2023 report (available in Polish here), as many as 55% of all women in IT engaged in software development as well as 40% of female IT specialists were promoted in 2022. What is also very important, this trend has been picking up speed, also thanks to many NGOs in Poland, such as (Women in Technology, the above-mentioned Geek Girls Carrots, DARE IT, Girls Code Fun and popular events such as The Perspektywy Women in Tech Summit, Kobiety IT or Dzień kariery kobiety w IT. Moreover, according to The game industry of Poland – report 2023, the percentage of female employees is also very high in the GameDev industry, where Poland is one of the global leaders. In 2023, the number of women creating games in our country is one of the biggest in the world.
Poland owes its large number of available IT specialists to factors such as the popularity of technical degree programs at many universities. Each major Polish city has a technical university – there are over 20 of them in total (and their quality is very high – please see Hackerrank 2021 survey where Polish universities are among the best in EMEA, including the University of Warsaw as a top institution to learn SQL). According to Statista’s data, Computer science is currently the most popular field of study in Poland. The situation is similar with related majors: according to Statistics Poland, the share of graduates of majors related to science, technology, industry and construction in relation to the total number of university graduates increased by almost 9% in the 10 years where the indexes were most recently measured: the share was 22.8% in the 2013/14 academic year, rising to 25.1% in 2019/20 (Statistics Poland, Human capital in Poland in the years 2016-2020, available in Polish here). The total number of students in IT and ICT degree programs in recent years was between 63 and 78 thousand, with about 10 500 – 13 500 graduates per year, as reported by the same Statistics Poland. Moreover, this trend has been intensifying in recent years. According to the report The IT/ICT Sector in Poland – report 2023, in 2022 alone, over 44,000 students started studying Computer Science.
In the context of the popularity of work in the IT sector in Poland, it is also worth mentioning a fun fact revealed by recent Remitly’s survey analyzing every country’s dream job (based on Google search data). Poland is among a few states on Earth where the Software Engineer is the most desired position while in other countries jobs like Writer, Influencer, or Businessman dominate.
The fact that so many young Poles dream of a career in IT obviously stems from the prestige of working in this industry and higher, regularly increasing salaries compared to other industries. Consequently, the cost of employing Polish IT specialists is not among the lowest in the world today – according to the Emerging Europe’s Future of IT report from 2022, the average gross salary in the ICT sector in Poland is currently €2,250 per month (all ICT positions are taken into account). However, it remains much more attractive to employers than in most countries in the Global North. According to HackerRank, salaries of Software Developers in Poland in recent years were around 63% lower than in the USA, 54% lower than in Australia, 44% lower than in Canada, and 37% lower than in Germany and the UK. Moreover, the same HackerRank survey indicates that the earnings of Software Developers in Poland were lower than in countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil.
Source: HackerRank
When talking about the remuneration of IT specialists in Poland, we must remember that their salaries are much higher than the average in the country and that the cost of living in Poland is much lower than in many neighboring countries. This makes it an attractive location to hire Polish IT professionals. Poland has kept its own currency (zloty) and the majority of prices here are much lower than, for example, in the countries of the Eurozone. As a consequence, among the 42 European states presented in the Numbeo study, Poland is ranked 30th in terms of the cost of living. Lower costs, together with the growing quality of living in the country cause many Polish Tech professionals, who earlier emigrated to Western countries, today come back to Poland. According to Euronews, after years of steady economic growth, educated and experienced Poles are returning to their homeland in a kind of “reverse brain drain”. All this contributes even more to the popularity of working in the area of technology, so it should be expected that Poland’s position as the largest supplier of excellent IT employees in Central and Eastern Europe will only strengthen in the future.
Hence, by building your team in Poland you will gain access to the largest pool of IT professionals in CEE, which will grow significantly in the coming years. For IT companies, this translates directly into product manufacturing capabilities and, accordingly, to revenues. Another very important factor is the impact on costs, with staff salaries being the key component. When considering the location of your Engineering Team, it is a good idea to think not only about revenues and costs but also about the overall background conditions in the region and country. Working with Tech companies on a daily basis, we have tried to make a list of all key factors of importance to international IT businesses – to check them out, go to: Why do IT in Poland?