IT professionals have lowest rate of trade union membership
If we don’t include managerial employees, IT professionals clearly have the lowest rate of union membership among employees in Tekna professions. In c...
Among Tekna professions, tech-related jobs have shown on average the highest growth rate.
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Tekna professions will survive COVID-19
Written by Øystein Krogsrud, Tekna Magazine
Published: Mar. 3 2021
Statistics Norway’s most recent jobs report based on last year’s data shows a significant decrease in Norway’s employment sector, while Tekna professions showed growth – even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
There were 1.7% fewer collective wage earners in Norway last year, while there were 2.2% more wage earners in Tekna professions. These had a stronger job growth than the rest of the country before the coronavirus appeared, but this difference grew even more in Tekna professions’ favor throughout the past year’s pandemic.
Tekna professions doing well
Online and multimedia developers are “king of the hill” with respect to percentage growth, as shown below in the graph showing all Tekna professions. But it is tech-related jobs that have on average shown the highest level of growth among all the Tekna professions. The so-called IT advisors, comprised of 53,000 wage earners divided among nine IT professions, had an average growth of 5.2% last year. Systems analysts/-architects make up almost half of these IT advisors and had an annual growth rate of 5.8%.
The Tekna professions are doing well compared with many other professional groups. Servers, kitchen assistants, bartenders as well as fast food workers and café workers form as large a group as IT advisors. The four low-wage professions in the hospitality trade have altogether more than 50,000 wage earners, even after a drop of over 12,000 wage earners in one year (approx. 20%).
Going green in the tech industry
A certain number of Tekna professions have also seen a decline in the past year, among them civil engineers in petroleum technology as well as geologists and geophysicists. According to Statistics Norway’s employment projections, the number of jobs in the oil and gas extraction industry will hit a peak in 2022 before oil-related jobs start to fall by 25-30% up to 2040. At the close of 2020, there were 57,000 wage earners in these two industries: crude oil extraction and natural gas, and services in mining and extraction. According to figures from Statistics Norway, these numbers are at the same level as one year ago; in addition, in 2018, there were 140,000 jobs in petroleum-related fields. It now appears that oil-related Tekna professions have started their long-anticipated decline. The number of jobs in the geology and geophysics fields have fallen for five quarters in a row, while civil engineers in the petroleum industry have fallen for two quarters in a row.
It is the IT professions that are best equipped to become the “new oil”. Along with other clients, Tekna ordered a new report from Samfunnsøkonomisk Analyse, which shows that the number of IT jobs will come to equal those in the oil industry. According to the report, the need for the number of people employed in IT will increase from around 56,000 in 2019 to 94,000 in 2030.While this need will increase at all educational levels, the growth will clearly be greatest among individuals having completed higher level education.
