Uncovering insights into Amsterdam’s booming start-up scene

Amsterdam enjoys a reputation of being one of the main start-up hubs in Europe. But how exactly does the local start-up ecosystem look like? What is the composition of the workforce? What unique skills can we find there? LinkedIn data can answer those and many more questions.

Generating labour market insights is part our vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce by composing what we call the Economic Graph, a digital map of the global economy. Our latest Economic Graph report focuses on the start-up ecosystem in Amsterdam.

By grouping together all of the LinkedIn member profiles in the Amsterdam start-up ecosystem and analysing the aggregate of all the experience, skills and education, we uncovered unique insights and trends relevant to the local economy. The results of the research done in partnership with StartupAmsterdam were presented earlier this month during a round table event at our Amsterdam office.

Analysis of the city’s start-up ecosystem confirmed the strength of the technology sector. We uncovered that 50% of members active in the city’s start-up ecosystem work in the tech sector. This proportion of members from the start-up ecosystem working in tech sector is four times higher when compared to the member numbers for the whole of Amsterdam Metropolitan Area that we revealed earlier this year.

Looking at job functions, we established that 16% of members in the ecosystem fall within the category of software developers and engineers. Sales, IT and entrepreneurial roles follow suit featuring strongly across members in the ecosystem.

Our analysis of the local workforce also revealed what skills are unique to the members of the start-up community. Relative to the rest of the Netherlands, the Amsterdam start-up workforce has a comparative advantage in tech skills. The list of unique skills is led by Cloud and Distributed Computing, followed by Mobile Development and Perl/Python/Ruby programming languages.

As for trends in hiring, we concluded that 60% of members in the ecosystem who have Statistical Analysis and Data Mining skills have started in a new position in the previous 12 months.

Earlier this year, the European Commission awarded the city with the title of the European Capital of Innovation 2016, recognising Amsterdam’s vision and emphasis placed on policies that support smart growth and digital innovation.

We believe that our Economic Graph insights can help the city deliver on its vision and further strengthen its position as an attractive hub for tech talent and innovative start-ups.

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