The Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) from Maastricht University has conducted an elaborate analysis on developments in the Dutch job market, education and jobs until 2022. The report (“De arbeidsmarkt naar opleiding en beroep tot 2022”) foresees an employment growth of 1% per year until 2022. This comes down to 520.000 more people working over the course of six years. This development leads to positive perspectives for jobs until 2022. At the same time bottlenecks in staffing between sectors have been identified which will also impact the increasingly cross-sectoral, but hard to measure, security domain.
Expansion of Demand
An average annual expansion demand of 0.7% is expected for public administration, security and legal professions. The largest expansion demand is expected for lawyers (also the largest professional group in this class) and security personnel (both 1.7% per year). The number of job openings for public administration, security and legal professions is estimated at 3.6% per year on average. Government managers and security personnel have the best prognosis at 4.4% per year. In contrast, relatively few job openings are expected to be released in the military professions. For the IT professions, a relatively high demand for extra workers is expected at an average of 1.1% per year. By far the largest group in IT professions is formed by software and application developers. For them, an annual increase in the number of working people of an average of 1.1% per year is estimated.
Bottlenecks in Staffing
This increased demand also entails that employers must take into account major bottlenecks in, for example, the staffing IT and technical professions over the next six years. These bottlenecks for IT jobs are especially expected for software and application developers and database and network specialists. Employers will partly experience difficulties filling technical positions because technical educated personnel is increasingly occupied in non-technical jobs. With other words, traditional routes from education to occupation are changing meaning that people are employed in different fields than what they were originally educated for.
Developments Impacting the Security Domain
These developments also impact the increasingly cross-sectoral security domain. An interesting example is cybersecurity, which can be defined as falling under the IT sector, the security sector or both. In this example, bottlenecks in the staffing of IT professions thus directly impact the security domain. It is therefore key to understand the connection between education, profession and industry or business sector better when assessing the rapidly developing security domain and the possibilities for employment in the security sector.