What is the current job market like for Quality Assurance (QA) positions in Europe?

🙋 Questions
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Any suggestion or recommendation on this

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I’m not really sure where you are going with this?
What do you mean with current job market like for QA and suggestion for this?

Do you mean something like companies are searching for X or Y profiles? But then suggestions or recommendations would be weird. I’m a bit confused :thinking:

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Europe is quite a big market, with big city tech hubs, country differences, and industry-specific trends. Entry into the market differs a lot by each country’s own labor rules…

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If I am looking for job opportunities in Europe, which skills are currently in high demand?

When seeking job opportunities in Europe, it’s essential to identify the skills that are currently in high demand.

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Noted and thank for your information

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I haven’t been actively applying in the past year or more, but I did notice that there are fewer jobs in 2023 than was the case in 2022. A lot of them require automation skills, looks like UI automation is still the highest type of automation in demand, from what I observed. Lastly, I did look for a side gig in the fintech domain, and it seems like it’s less affected by the current crisis, but a lot of roles in this particular domain (especially managerial ones, like QA lead, test manager, etc.) are very often only on-site roles.

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I see what you mean now, as @jesper already mentioned, Europe is quite big. It’s not so easy to say you have to do this or that. Even within Belgium it differs from region to region.

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I’ve been looking for jobs in two separate countries in central Europe for the past 6 months.
Here’s what I found:

  • There are fewer jobs compared to previous years; e.g. Amazon was hiring overall 700 people last year in their EU headquarters, and this year ~120(interns included);
  • The number of consultancies is as much as the number of jobs; I see for each job 5 consultancy companies & an extra 5 recruiters(who get a recruiter fee) & recruiters for consultancy as well(double fees);
  • The salaries have stayed the same or have not increased at the same rate as the cost of living in the past 5-7 years; because there’s lower demand and a high supply of testers, the cheapest is sought after most of the time;
  • There seems to be a higher demand for juniors(1-3y) with decent, mid level experience;
  • There are hiring waves throughout the year; some months are very dry, where you barely find anything;
  • There are barely any hybrid positions left; most require to be on-site.
  • The hiring process is very quick in some cases - where they try to fit someone on a position 1-2 weeks after the job was posted; and/or they expect you to be able to start working in 1 month;
  • There’s close to 0 exploratory testing required, it’s mostly test-case confirmatory-driven testing or UI automation based on those test cases;
  • In terms of UI automation dominant are jobs where specific languages/tools are required: java/python/typescript/js & selenium, cypress, playwright - where you need 3-5 years of experience;
  • In the past 2-3 years there’s a lot more workforce imported in software testing due to the locals not taking these low-paying jobs; the country that I’m in has even started to create laws to allow for outside EU people to be able to get a work visa sooner;
  • There’s an increase in demand that you are fluent in the local language;
  • Adding to what others have mentioned - there’s an increase of specific niche sets of skills depending on the domain, business, tech stack, and region; and this might have become this way due to a decrease in general of the number of testers needed;
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This is nuts! Here in Belgium most are Hybrid, if companies offer full time on-site, they won’t get any applicants :joy:

There are companies here which offer 2 days remote - 3 days on-site, and they struggle to find people due to this company rule (enforced by higher up).

I do believe indeed that consultancy companies are a better treat for testers (manual or automation). Just because (not all) companies don’t acknowledge the benefit of testers and they can’t spend the same amount of money on them while they totally should. At consultancy companies developers and testers and basically equal. Especially due to the high demands of testers and yea … development you learn in school so there are a lot of them… testing is a different story.

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I filled a recruiter survey yesterday, and I have to say. Whenever people ask this question online, I get the impression that they are not looking for work, but are looking for hashtags to use in recruiting drives. There is not quantity response, merely qualitative guesses.

Right now it is hard to recruit in the UK, it has been hard to recruit since 2019 to be fair. and I’m sure it’s anecdotal, but this year has been low on candidates presenting themselves. Which tells me it’s a seller’s market still at least in Cambridge and environs.

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Hi All,
Any information about the job market in sweden ?how is the situation there ? Are there any scope for testers ?

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@deament – if you get the chance, perhaps you could share some thoughts on this.

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@rahulspartan From what I have been seeing and hearing from others it’s the slowest it’s been in a while. Not too many companies are hiring eh

I imagine though it’s easier for people with skills in high demand (but even then it’s still tough).

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Another thing I want to add is that even though a lot of Swedes speak English. There actually aren’t that many companies that will hire someone who doesn’t speak Swedish. (people don’t really talk about this, but yeah, it’s not easy.)
So the choice of companies are limited to the massive ones like Spotify, IKEA, Volvo, Sony, Axis, King etc.

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I would like to say it’s the slowest but companies ARE hiring.
It’s the slowest because companies have been really picky.

Companies start to look further then just people with Selenium on their resume and they finally start to ask decent questions. (They often hire QA Consultants to do the interviews, to find the right people)

They try to pick up all the QA consultants because they get their knowledge from internal bootcamps. Which is a big difference then the people who just do selenium, since in our region, it’s not that big a thing anymore.

Some companies are still blind of course, but I suppose you don’t want to work their either :stuck_out_tongue:

This is indeed a struggle for Dutch companies also, even though they do everything in English, Dutch is still mandatory… or French, depends in which part of Belgium you are.

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