The digital transformation is constantly presenting companies with new challenges. Industry 4.0 brings with it numerous new regulations, laws and requirements for companies that often have nothing to do with their core competencies. This confronts them with the question of whether they should develop this newly required expertise themselves, for example in the area of big data and software development, or whether they should buy in the knowledge in the form of freelancers or development partners.

Big data increases demand for IT experts

Big data is an absolute hot topic in the wake of Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT. As a result of this trend, the demand for well-trained IT specialists is growing continuously. This is the result of the Etengo Freelancer Index, or ETX for short, a representative company survey designed as a long-term analysis that Bitkom Research conducts every six months on behalf of the personnel service provider Etengo. According to this survey, four out of ten large German companies (37%) anticipate a steadily growing demand for IT freelancers, while more than half (56%) expect at least a constant development. The larger the company, the more important freelance big data experts are: 45% of companies with at least 2,000 employees expect demand to increase. Big data is an important topic for the majority of companies across all sectors. Nine out of ten companies (87%) have already implemented at least one big data project, are already planning one or are currently implementing one. The majority of companies assume that the new General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), which will come into force in May 2018, will facilitate big data projects thanks to the clear regulations within the EU (57%) and will not restrict the opportunities offered by big data (62%).

IT freelancers are most important in the industrial sector (75 percent), followed by the services (72 percent) and retail (66 percent) sectors. The study also clearly shows that IT freelancers will continue to be in high demand in the future: More than half (59 percent) assume that their importance will continue to increase over the next six months.

The importance of the expertise of external freelancers is demonstrated by the number of hours they worked in the second half of 2017: Accordingly, they account for almost a quarter (23 percent) of the working hours of the total IT project volume - and the trend is rising. Nikolaus Reuter, CEO of Etengo (Deutschland) AG, explains the result: "In the age of digitalization, the German economy is increasingly reliant on highly specialized IT knowledge in order to keep up the pace of innovation. This must be available at lightning speed in order to achieve initial results quickly, for example in the context of pilot projects. It is foreseeable that this permanently growing, additional demand can only be met through flexible forms of deployment in the course of project work."