The IT labor market in Bulgaria experiences high dynamics during the last 15 years. It has more than 600% revenue growth for the country and even the region (BNR, 2017). The highest salaries in Bulgaria are in this sector.
A closer look at the demographic characteristics can form a trusted perception of the market potential. The main source of statistical data in this article is Eurostat.
Women in Technology
Working women increased significantly the workforce during the years. The prejustice that the technology industries are unappropriated for women is still alive but why shall the future repeate the past?
The Eurostat research demonstrates that the expectations of market potential in Bulgaria vice the overall country population shall be significantly different comparing to most of the western countries in Europe.
Looking to the Bulgarian present, the research of Eurostat in 2017 reports that 59% of persons employed in science and technology in Bulgaria were women, 85% of which hold an University degree. Furthermore:
Bulgaria is in the TOP 3 countries where the majority of scientists and engineers (53%) were women” together with Lithuania (57%) and Latvia (53%) which are also in Eastern Europe.
(Eurostat, 2019)
Knowing that 41% is the average European ratio, it is interesting to note that those TOP 3 countries are all in Eastern Europe. For comparison we have Germany with 33% and France with 41%.
There are more sources that show this tendency. In 2006 the men to women ratio at the IT / software development sector was the impressive 2:1 (BNR, 2017).
This softer male to women distribution combines well with the typical Bulgarian orientation toward the people rather than to the job. Bulgarian teams are considered as relatively cohesive even if knowing the overall age, it is easy to conclude that overall people are not egoless.
Age and maturity
The dynamics on the IT market in Bulgaria hide a risk of not consolidated expectations related to the organizational maturity (in both directions).
Ekaterina Kaleva
According to BNR, in 2006 over 90% of the IT professionals are under 35 years old. And indeed it is already a common practice to have employees which are still following their university degrees. They are even cases of software developer under the age of 18.
Employers expect the organization and the know how to be naturally built by the employees. Such expectations could be hardly met by the ambitious young employees urging to complete the tasks of the day. Additionally the employees expect respectful ways to express their opinion and this is rarely considered by their young leadership teams. Those dynamic creates a tornado in cultural perspective, hurts business sustainability, and at a later stage kill efficiency.
On those and more reasons adopting Agile is a suitable approach.
A significant part of the IT business in Bulgaria is practically outsourcing of operations. Usually they are not business critical, so the need of investment in developing the right company culture is often underestimated.
Summing it all up, the modeling of the company working culture is an important part of the business strategy when expanding in Bulgaria.