The growth in terms of jobs created between 2020 and 2022 by Italian startups is 59%. The Average annual growth rate is 26.2%, with 80% of jobs generated by about 25% of startups. Notably, in 2022, 50% of jobs are attributable to scaleups. This is what emerges from the research “Startups, scaleups and employment in Italy: impact and trends” carried out by the Hi-tech Startup and Startup Thinking Observatories of the Politecnico di Milano for Italian Tech Alliance , which wanted to photograph the state of the art of the Italian startup ecosystem from an employment point of view.
“Startups are not only young, innovative and high-growth companies, but are confirmed as one of the main engines of the economy of our country, capable of making a significant contribution to the creation of new jobs – says Francesco Cerruti, general manager of Italian Tech Alliance -. The presence of a healthy and dynamic ecosystem of startups is a fundamental guarantee on the one hand of the vitality of the productive fabric and on the other hand of the creation of professional opportunities up to the task for many potential professionals who are too often forced to emigrate to our country. It is appropriate that the institutions, as is the case in most other large countries regardless of the political color of those who govern, devote more and more attention to these issues.”
“It is clear that the hi-tech startups financed represent, also for our country, an essential strategic asset for the economy. The growth rates of the population employed by startups exceed those of all other entrepreneurial categories, companies and SMEs, and underline the urgency of fostering the conversion of startups into scaleups. This step is crucial to reach an initial maturity of the Italian startup ecosystem,” says Antonio Ghezzi, director of the Hi-tech Startup Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano. “However, to effectively promote this process, we need to pay attention to warning signs such as the shortage of technical and scientific skills and the risk of brain drain to foreign countries with more competitive offers.”
The numbers
Between 2020 and 2022, the funded startups recorded a 59% growth in employees: if in 2020 there were a total of 9,640 employees, in 2022 they had exceeded 15,300 units. In particular, 2,779 new jobs were generated in 2021, rising to 2,940 in 2022.
Comparing the average annual employee growth rate with that of comparable samples of SMEs and large companies, it can be seen that at an absolute level, large companies maintain higher values in terms of net jobs generated, but startups generate a higher number of jobs than SMEs and at a relative level they have a higher growth rate than both large companies, and to small and medium-sized enterprises, which stand at 4.3%, 3.2% and 6% respectively.
Startups that received a late-stage funding round (over €15 million), experienced higher growth than those that received smaller funding rounds. In fact, the average number of employees employed by startups grows consistently based on the capital raised: while employees in the pre-seed phase are on average 7.3 in 2022 (+24% compared to 2021), 14.1 in the Seed phase (+28% on 2021), already in the Series A phase they grow to 36.6 (+15% compared to 2021) up to 79.3 for late stage startups (+34% on 2021).
Late stage startups create an average of 19 jobs per year, while pre-seed startups create an average of 1.36 jobs per year, which confirms that pre-seed and seed rounds mainly support the development and validation of the business idea, while Series A and late stage startups mainly support dimensional growth. Also for this reason, the research commissioned by Italian Tech Alliance has deepened the analysis by focusing on scaleups that represent 11% of the sample of startups analyzed to study the situation from the employment point of view of those startups that have reached a significant size and have already been validated by the market.
Scaleup employees increased from 4,310 in 2020 to 6,266 in 2021 (+40%) to 7,623 in 2022 (+26%). Of the 15,359 startup jobs photographed by the research, about half (50.4%) are attributable to scaleups.
From interviews conducted with Italian scaleups, it emerges that in 2023, 30% of employees at Italian scaleups are women: although there is a gender gap, the female presence is growing compared to 2020 when it was 24%. The gap is more pronounced in tech-intensive contexts.
82% of the employees of the scaleups interviewed have at least a bachelor’s degree, 70% have a technical-scientific background, 18% economic-managerial and 12% humanistic.
As far as engagement channels are concerned, 94% of the scaleups interviewed use Linkedin for recruiting, while 63% use career services or fairs and events, 44% head-hunters, mainly for more senior or particular profiles, such as protected categories, or recruiting companies.
Manyscaleups complain of difficulties in finding recent graduates or seniors with technical skills, particularly on the software side. It is also worth noting the difficulty of finding managerial and commercial figures who have skills or backgrounds in the technical and technological fields, figures that are often forced to search abroad. This is confirmed by the latest DESI report (2022), where Italy is below the European average in terms of the presence of ICT specialists and records the lowest figure in the EU of ICT graduates.
The latest data emerging from the research are related to the average gross entry level salary of startups, which is 27,700 euros, the type of employment relationship, all the scaleups interviewed prefer permanent contracts to offer a stable position and be more attractive and, in particular, 86% of the employees of the scaleups interviewed are offered a permanent contract, employee share ownership involvement, with 94% of scaleups surveyed offering a shareholding to the entire company population (31%) or management alone (63%).
Finally, almost all of the scaleups interviewed state that at least one of their employees who left their organization has continued his or her professional career path in a corporate company, a symptom of a potential revitalization of more traditional companies, with the possibility of contaminating the new company with a more innovative work culture. In addition, about 40% confirm that at least one of their employees has continued his career in another startup or even, 19% of scaleups say that at least one of the employees who left has gone on to create a new company, with a flywheel effect for the ecosystem.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©