Is the Current Job Market for Front-End Developers Saturated?

Is front-end development still the best entry field in tech? Or should you focus on something else entirely? Read on to find out what are the best bets for landing a first job in the current tech market.

Navigating your career safely to new waters requires you to choose your niche wisely (Photo by orbtal media on Unsplash)

People looking to get their first job in tech are often recommended to learn front-end development. This seems solid advice for people with little or no experience in the IT sector. Learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript is seen as a “bare minimum” to land a first tech job.

An example of such advice is found below, as seen in a recent LinkedIn post:

I think this post offers some great advice:

1. Pick a stack and learn it well (or: don’t try to learn everything at once).
2. Create a portfolio and start applying for jobs (or: focus on tangible outcomes/deliverables)
3. Personalize your portfolio with unique that add a personal touch (or: be you)

However, the author also admits that the current job market is a little different compared to when he got his first job. This is confirmed in the reactions below. One reaction is worth displaying here as it serves as the input for the rest of this blog post:

Paraphrasing this reaction, it says this:

1. Choosing frontend development as an entry ticket to the current job market is not as easy as it was as there are fewerjobs, meaning you are competing with more experienced developers.
2. There are other and better entry points for career-switching job seekers than frontend development.

This reaction got me thinking and was the starting point for writing this blog post. I decided to do a little research to see if there more jobs in areas such as DeVops and cybersecurity compared with frontend. Here are some search results from a LinkedIn job search, where I ran a simple search for new job ads for the EU (where I live) that were posted during the last week. To narrow down the search results even further, I only searched for entry-level jobs. I will compare the numbers for entry-level front-end developer jobs with senior jobs later.

The search for entry-level DevOps jobs in a single week is 3410 for the EU. Searching for cybersecurity entry-level jobs in the EU, we get the following number:

Finally, looking for frontend entry-level jobs, we get this number:

Based on these numbers, it looks like there are more front-end developer jobs than there are in DevOps or cybersecurity. A logical conclusion could be that frontend development is an area with more job opportunities for entry-level tech people than DevOps or cybersecurity.

Just for the sake of completeness, here is the number for mid-senior frontend developer jobs for the EU for last week:

So, what do these numbers mean? Absolutely speaking, there are more entry-level frontend developer jobs than mid-senior level frontend developer jobs (5299 versus 4912). However, I would not trust these numbers as LinkedIn’s search algorithm doesn’t seem very rigid when providing you with search results. For example, when looking for junior developer jobs, you will be presented with senior developer jobs too. This probably explains why there are more “entry-level” jobs than mid/senior level jobs.

So, is the market for front-end developers saturated or not?

What is the takeaway from this blog post? Should career switchers to tech focus on other areas than frontend development or not? I personally think the advice from Lucas Werle Melz to focus on other areas than frond-end development is very useful, for several reasons.

First, he notices that career switchers focus solely on frontend development, while there is much more than just that when it comes to new and exciting tech areas. If you look at the numbers mentioned above from this perspective, both cybersecurity and DevOps offer thousands of jobs. Granted, I suspect these are not all“entry-level” jobs, but yes, there are opportunities there.

Second, he mentions the strong competition when looking for entry-level front-end developer jobs as a result of recent layoffs. He does not say where these layoffs happened, and I suspect he means the US where large tech companies cut many IT jobs (Meta, Google, and Twitter come to mind). But this doesn’t mean that things are necessarily better in the EU: if you look at the number of applicants for new job posts, which run in the 100s within 1–2 days after publishing, I have the feeling the market is saturated as Lucas says. (Interesting side note: Lucas is from Portugal, and if you search for frontend developer jobs there, the number of applicants per job is significantly higher than in the rest of Europe).

His insight on competition between entry-level tech job applications and experienced developers is very valid and spot-on I think. The recent layoffs in the US that tech is no longer a safe bet, but a market where there is fierce competition between experienced developers. And they will be offered the best jobs, whether these are entry-level jobs or mid/senior level jobs.