IT Job Openings Grow in Uruguay, Worsening Local Talent Crunch

There seems to be a bonanza of IT job openings in Uruguay, a situation which has worsened the local tech talent crunch.

Uruguayan IT and non-IT companies are struggling to fill tech job openings. The scarcest profiles correspond to programmers, software engineers, systems engineers and database administrators, as well as AI experts and data science engineers, according to a recent study by human capital monitor Advice.

Uruguay’s technology sector created more than 13,000 jobs between November 2021 and October 2022. By the end of the year, the demand for tech-skilled professionals soared further as non-IT sectors created over 4,000 jobs for tech workers.

Montevideo accounts for 62% of these vacancies; 15% were attributed to the rest of the country, while the rest of the vacancy locations were not specified in the study.

The lack of talent has become more evident in recent years as companies have adopted digital technologies to optimize their operations. According to Advice, the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI platforms is also leading to a fundamental change in the way institutions and companies operate.

More than 3,000 IT positions are lying vacant in the country, reported local news outlets citing data from the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technologies (CUTI).

Uruguay is doing everything it can to ease the talent shortage, with the government recently agreeing to issue special visas for foreign technology workers.