Engineering, tech and healthcare: job vacancies in these sectors account for 70 per cent of the average number of vacancies

Engineering, tech and healthcare. Amid the advance of artificial intelligence and the progressive ageing of the population, the Italian labour market is proving increasingly vulnerable in certain sectors crucial to the country’s future, where the number of daily applications is lower than the average for job advertisements posted, according to Indeed’s Hiring Lab. The engineer who is, by far, the hardest to find is the reliability engineer – that is, the engineer responsible for ensuring the efficiency and capability of a system or component to perform the required function under specific conditions and for a specified period of time. Whilst the number of job advertisements is rising, the number of daily applications is 95 per cent lower than the average for these adverts. These roles are mainly concentrated in Piedmont, where 27 per cent of all adverts are posted, and in Emilia-Romagna, which accounts for 22 per cent of the vacancies for this role.

Lisa Feist, an economist at Indeed, explains that “an analysis of the hardest-to-fill job categories highlights particular difficulties in the engineering and technology sectors, as well as in the healthcare sector. In technical design and IT development, the daily number of applications for roles related to industrial, electronic and mechanical engineering, and software development has fallen by over 70 per cent compared to the national average for job advertisements. Professions within the data management and communication ecosystem are also struggling, with reduced application volumes for roles in mathematics, statistics and information design. The healthcare and care sector is no exception, with the decline in daily applications showing figures significantly below the average for pharmacists, healthcare technicians and medical and surgical roles.”

According to data from the Indeed Hiring Lab, the daily number of applications for job adverts posted on Indeed’s Italian portal for industrial and electronic engineering is 76 per cent lower than the average number of applications received per advert posted, 72 per cent fewer for software development, 71 per cent fewer for pharmacy and 70 per cent fewer for mechanical engineering. These are followed by information design and research, with 68 per cent fewer than the average, healthcare technicians with 67 per cent, civil engineering at 60 per cent below average, mathematics and statistics at 58 per cent below average, and beauty and wellness at 57 per cent below average – the same as medicine and surgery.

From a geographical perspective, the region under the most pressure is Lombardy, which ranks first in terms of the volume of job adverts across all sectors where it is difficult to fill vacancies. The most telling example is the field of Mathematics and Statistics, where 50 per cent of the job adverts posted on Indeed in Italia are concentrated in Lombardy. Lazio and Veneto take turns in second place in the rankings for most of the ‘hard-to-fill’ professional categories.