Tech is Ireland’s most productive and highest paying industry, according to CSO data

Workers in the technology sector have the highest annual wages in Ireland, with workers receiving a total of €8.5 billion in wages in 2019.

According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), 90,766 people were employed in 5,178 information and communication technology (ICT) companies.

Over 4,400 of these were domestic companies operating in the industry in 2019, with these organizations accounting for nearly half of employment in the entire industry.

These local companies also paid their employees €2 billion in wages during the year.

The CSO report also notes that around 63 per cent of those employed in the industry had a bachelor’s degree or higher and that the workers are some of the best educated in the Irish economy.

The industry is Ireland’s most productive and large companies with more than 250 employees had a gross value added of €704,193 per worker, more than 10 times that of medium and small companies.

Across the sector, the CSO reported that 32 per cent of all ICT workers were women, with women accounting for just 5 per cent of all telecoms engineer jobs in Ireland.

Workers in the industry also tended to look for a new job within the industry, with the 10 percent of all ICT workers who left their jobs in 2019 remaining in the region.

A fifth of those who switched jobs chose to switch between multinationals and domestic companies.

The ICT sector is heavily export-oriented and €117 billion of the industry’s €128 billion production output was exported in 2019. Domestic companies exported half of their production, an amount reaching almost €2 billion.

Key export products included computer and information services and intellectual property fees.

Total investments in this sector amounted to €103 billion, 10 percent of all capital investments here.

The CSO’s lead statistician, Michael Connolly, said the results showed the dominance of multinational companies.

“The report presents some of the amazing numbers for the global corporations here: imports and exports, which account for a quarter of the country’s total GDP,” he said.

“The big foreign multinational ICT companies make big profits here, most of which go to their owners, but they paid almost 4 billion euros in taxes in 2019 before their profits flowed out,” he added.