The survey covered 168 companies covering manufacturing, construction, financial and business services Shutterstock

The survey covered 168 companies covering manufacturing, construction, financial and business services Shutterstock

The Fedil survey conducted with Luxembourg's Chamber of Commerce, House of Training, the government and job agency Adem found that over half (56%) of expected new hires over the coming two years would require post-graduate qualifications. It marked a strong increase from 2018, when 41% of hires needed a Master’s or PhD.

“It’s interesting to see that master and doctorate qualifications are highly required, especially in the industrial and financial sectors,” Fedil’s advisor for social and legal affairs Philippe Heck explained at a Fedil Industry Days talk on Monday.

Even if BTS [a two-year advanced technical certificate] make up just 7% of the qualifications being sought after, Luxembourg has developed vocational training adapted to industry needs, such as the BTS in cloud computing, connected buildings and cities, the internet of things and game programming and game design, the expert said.

2-year forecast

The survey was conducted to assess the profiles and skills needed in Luxembourg over the next two years, to pressure government into creating training in these fields and raise awareness among young people. Of all the hires foreseen by the 168 companies polled, seven out of ten were new roles, a proportion that remained stable from past years.

Top of the list were programmer, web developer, API developer, cloud application developer and back end developer profiles, while consultants were second most looked for. “It’s one of the functions that’s had the largest growth since 2018,” said Heck.

Inès Baer, future skills initiative manager at Adem, shed light on profiles posted in Luxembourg over the past five years. Exactly half were found in construction, with industry in second (17%), followed by administration, IT, and other business support roles (11%), installation and maintenance (7%), sales (5%) and logistics (5%).

The most sought-after IT profiles were for developers (over 50), information engineers (over 20) and systems administrators (15).

Emerging roles include machine supervisors, HR assistants, commercial strategists, automation roles and software engineers. Demand was meanwhile growing for full stack developer, IT engineering, business intelligence, web developer, security architect, security systems auditing, IT project manager and IT consultant profiles. Baer said there had been a gradual decline in profiles for IT developers, functions analysts and specialisations.