By Kirstie McDermott
We know - almost every conversation you have these days is likely to come back around, at some point, to one of the following topics: the rising cost of living, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, inflation or even more cheerfully, the looming recession.
ADVERTISEMENTAll these interconnected factors are leading to an environment where many of us are worried about food, energy and job security. The fact that tech firms have been quietly – or not so quietly – laying off employees throughout the spring and summer has also caused alarm for some workers.
The online car retailer Cazoo is pulling out of the EU, cutting 750 jobs. Stripe, the payments decacorn, cancelled TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year, culling heads by around 55. It also revised its internal valuation down by 28 per cent.
And Klarna, the buy now, pay later giant, has laid off 10 per cent of its global workforce and has seen its valuation plummet by 85 per cent.
Cost cutting and culled headcounts
Many tech companies are right-sizing. For some, expected growth based on previous forecasts hasn’t materialised, or they are shoring up their bottom lines to insulate against a potential recession. The result is that costs are cut and headcounts are culled in an effort to preserve cash.
Those who had been considering a job move before the end of the year may now be thinking twice. But the signs are still broadly positive – for now – in Europe’s jobs market, according to the European Labour Market Barometer.
ADVERTISEMENT"The war in Ukraine is dragging down Europe’s economy. And the integration of Ukrainian refugees is also leading to higher unemployment for the time being. Nonetheless, the European labour markets are still holding their own," says Enzo Weber, head of forecast at the Institute for Employment Research.
In that shaky jobs market, cloud companies are resisting. In late July, both Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent, announced quarterly earnings. The big takeaway was that the cloud businesses and services at both companies came out on top.
Microsoft’s server and cloud revenue increased by 26 per cent, driven by Azure and its other cloud services, which saw sales growth of 46 per cent. Google Cloud revenue was also up 36 per cent year on year.
It’s not so surprising. Even early on during the COVID-19 crisis, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella flagged that the company had "seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months".
'Remote everything'
Now, we are "remote everything" - from how our teams run, to training and development through e-learning, to sales and customer service operations, as well as critical cloud infrastructure and security.
And, according to Gartner, the sector is only going to continue growing. By 2025, 95 per cent of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, compared to 30 per cent in 2021, and global cloud revenue is set to reach €474 billion this year, up from €408 billion in 2021.
Europe now has over 120 unicorns (privately-owned companies with a valuation worth at least $1 billion, or €999 million), more than ever before. Many of those unicorns offer cloud-native products or services, including the Munich-headquartered Personio, offering cloud-based HR software solutions.
Mambu, from Berlin, is a cloud-based banking service that allows corporations to build loan offerings specific to customers' needs, while Contentful, also from Berlin, is an API-first headless content management platform.
Checkout.com, headquartered in London, is a digital payments platform. Celonis, a Munich-founded cloud company, focuses on process automation, while the Helsinki-based Aiven’s solution helps customers to manage open-source data infrastructure on all major clouds.
Now, as an ever-increasing number of new businesses begin operations from a cloud-native standpoint, it’s a good time to be working in the sector.
ADVERTISEMENTAnd it’s not all about technical jobs. Sure, cloud architects and cloud security experts are in high demand, but there are opportunities for those working in marketing, HR, finance, content and product development roles too.
If you’d like to find a new role in the sector, take a look at the three listed below, across job titles. There are plenty more to discover on the Euronews job board.
Senior Software Developer C# .NET (English), Cloud Solutions, Amsterdam Zuid
The Senior Software Developer will be working on scalability, performance, extensibility, customisation, and links to other platforms. By incorporating clever functionalities into our accounting, banking, payroll, and HR solutions, you'll support product teams.
You'll conduct research and POCs for novel or enhanced solutions and you’ll either put these discoveries into practice on your own or assist the product teams in using the fresh ideas.
You'll be working in the Microsoft tech stack, using .NET Framework (moving to .NET Core), a combination of VB.NET and C# (moving towards 100% C#), SQL Server, operated on Azure and AWS.
Sounds like the job for you? Find out more here.
Commercial B2B / Manager, Be-CLOUD, Lyon
Be-CLOUD is a consulting company specialising in cloud solutions such as Power BI, SharePoint, Azure, CRM Dynamics and Microsoft 365. Thanks to strong development and growth it is looking for a Commercial / B2B Manager who will work remotely.
You will be in charge of advising companies in order to support them in their transformation and growth as well as prospecting and making appointments, creating a client portfolio, managing your business pipeline, ensuring clear reporting and achieving defined monthly objectives.
If this is the sales role for you, find out more here.
Product Architect Cloud & Hosting, Heineken USA Inc., Amsterdam
The Product Architect Cloud & Hosting will join the Product Team Cloud & Hosting and will be working as part of the product DevOps team to support the design, build and delivery of expertise and support to features and agile projects.
As cloud computing moves into widespread use in Heineken, it has the potential to transform everything from product strategy to customer relationships, to entire office cultures. You will get to work in a cloud-first world, where new capabilities mean new kinds of product creation, new partnerships, and new ways of working. Sounds exciting? Get all the information here.
**To find a great cloud job, visit Euronews.jobs, set up alerts and bookmark the link for regular check-ins.
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