Here I feel comfortable, here I settle down

Crises around their peak are not good times for a job change. Most companies look to the future with little confidence and hold back on new hires and investments.

Until we know how long the pandemic will last and when our own customers will re-engage, this will also change only slowly. In terms of their own jobs, most professionals are happy to have a permanent commitment or employer at the moment.

This situation will change most quickly for IT and especially SAP specialists, probably even before the economic recovery. Companies' pent-up demand is already apparent.

The reasons are manifold: On the one hand, current projects have been stopped and, when the companies look positively into the future again, they have to be restarted, continued and successfully completed. Above all, a completely new need arises.

As many companies have discovered, they are not prepared for the home office phenomenon and need to readjust. Electronic communication within and between companies still has a long way to go, to say the least. Also, many business processes that were previously carried out in analog will be digitized.

One phenomenon that applies to at least some freelancers is the digital nomad. One of their characteristics is that they are free to choose where they work.

The increasing digital transformation, which is accelerated by Covid-19, ensures that more and more jobs can be performed in the home office and thus independently of the company location or its branches.

This makes the aforementioned study more significant, especially since it doesn't mean we all have to move to Singapore, the city that scored the highest. Several German cities are also among the top 20, including one - at least from my point of view - surprise.

In the study - which, incidentally, was started before Covid-19 - 100 cities worldwide were selected and evaluated on the basis of criteria such as their economic status, political rules, quality of life and equality in a total of 15 criteria.

The criteria used are among the metrics used to assess economies on the status of digital transformation and thus represent the maturity level well.

I assume that the best-rated cities will be able to further expand their position. Conversely, the worst-rated cities will probably continue to carry the red lantern.

In first place, as already mentioned, is Singapore with 100 points followed by five Scandinavian cities, namely Copenhagen (95 points), Helsinki (90 points), Oslo (89 points), Gothenburg (81 points) and Malmö (77 points). Only Dubai (85 points) came in fifth.

In the top 20 are the German cities of Munich (9th), Stuttgart (13th), Dresden (14th) and Frankfurt (19th). Others are Berlin (22), Leipzig (28), Hanover (39) and Hamburg (42). Switzerland features prominently with Geneva (10), Zurich (11) and Basel (25), while Austria has Graz (23), Linz (33) and Vienna (35).

We can assume that, on average, companies in higher-ranked cities will rehire faster and the number of open positions will also be greater.

It is also expected that newly created positions will tend to be in the top ranked cities. Look to the future with optimism and stay healthy!

If you want to have a look at the analysis yourself, here is the link to the study, the criteria and the possibility to sort the data freely: https://www.futurelearn.com/info/2020-best-cities-for-jobs-index