Figures from the Catalan Observatori del Treball for the first quarter of 2026 break a run: ICT employment fell 13.3% against the previous quarter, 25,700 people fewer. Year on year the decline is slight, 0.3%, but it is the first since 2022.

The sector now employs 166,200 people, 4.3% of Catalan employment. That is still a lot. The relevant part is not the number: it is that after years of steep growth, technical hiring has stopped assuming there will always be more.

An anomaly we have been exploiting for years

We build from Manresa. Not out of regional romanticism, but because for a long time it was a cost and retention advantage nobody was looking at. Hiring an engineer in the Bages has always been easier to sustain than hiring one in central Barcelona, where a better offer arrives every six months.

That advantage had an expiry date and remote work accelerated it: once competition for a profile becomes global, distance stops protecting you. What we have learned is that a location retains nobody on its own. The project does.

What you can offer outside the capital

A mid-sized company in a mid-sized city cannot compete on salary with a multinational. It can compete on three things large structures tend to lose:

  • Seeing the effect of your work. On a team of twelve, whoever builds an integration talks to whoever uses it. On a team of twelve hundred, they do not.
  • Actually deciding. Not contributing to the decision: making it, and answering for it.
  • Changing field without changing employer. A group with several companies lets you move from telecoms to real estate or to artificial intelligence without starting over.

None of the three appears on a job board, and all three are the real reason people stay.

The figure worth reading twice

According to ACCIÓ, Catalonia’s digital economy comprises 28,122 companies and 218,598 people employed, with a turnover of €41.495 billion. One figure inside that report says more than the totals: 46% of those companies were founded in the last decade.

That is a young ecosystem. And a young ecosystem packed into a few square kilometres is fragile, because it shares suppliers, shares clients and competes for the same people. Spreading out geographically is not a balancing policy: it is a way of reducing risk.

What I would do differently now

If I had to build a technical team outside Barcelona today, I would stop selling quality of life. It is true and it convinces nobody who is deciding their career. I would sell the uncomfortable part: here you will carry more responsibility than your experience warrants, and you will make mistakes that show.

That scares plenty of people off. The ones who stay tend to stay for years.

One bad quarter is not a trend. But it is the first warning in four years that technical talent has stopped being a resource that simply turns up.