How electronics jobs will be created across Europe
This will reflect a trend to increased automation in such countries as Germany, France, Italy and the UK – and the creation and movement of labour-intensive operations to lower-wage economies such as those in Eastern Europe.
However it is also expected that wage rates will continue to be higher than in mainstream manufacturing and continue to climb faster thanks to skills shortages across the continent. This is one reason IPC – the PCB industry association – commissioned the study and launched it with an announcement of a training initiative in Europe.
Electronics employment across the 28 member states of the European Union stood at 2.4 million in 2018 or about 8 percent of total manufacturing employment. It had climbed quite sharply from 2.2 million in 2015. Going forward it is expected to continue growing more slowly at 0.2 percent per year over the period 2018 to 2023.
The lessons of the past have been that most of the growth in recent years (2011 to 2018) has come in Eastern Europe – at more than 5 percent per annum in Romania and Latvia while it has decreased in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy and Sweden.
Ranking of electronic sector employment by country (000s of jobs) and as percentage of EU28. Sources: Oxford Economics, Haver, Eurostat.
However, what happens in Germany, which employed one-third of all the European Union’s electronics workers in 2018 is what is most significant. At 813,000 Germany employed almost four times as many as the next most populous employment countries; France (212,000), Italy (201,000) and UK (196,000), according to Oxford Economics.
Next: The future.
Going forward Germany is expected to be below the middle of the pack with a 0.3 percent contraction in employment per year. The strongest growth is expected in Croatia, Slovenia, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Romania, in that order with annual growth rates varying from 3.4 percent down to 1.8 percent.
Average annual employment growth by country from 2018 to 2023. Source: Oxford Economics.
France, Hungary, Belgium and Denmark are expected to be the weakest employers with contractions of between 1.4 percent and 0.7 percent.
Despite a decline in employment, the UK electronics sector is experiencing strong wage growth at rates well ahead of that seen in manufacturing and in the wider economy, both in the UK and in Germany.
IPC announced it is expanding its Workforce Champions initiative from the US to the European Union with a pledge to create at least 500,000 workforce training opportunities across the EU over the next five years.
“The chronic shortage of adequately skilled workers and the changes in skills required are some of the most difficult challenges facing the electronics industry in Europe and worldwide,” said IPC CEO John Mitchell, in a statement. “More than two-thirds of IPC companies indicate that a lack of skilled workers is constraining their ability to grow. That is why IPC is significantly expanding our industry’s efforts to engage young people and provide the education and training programs they need to enter and be successful in this industry.”
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