Top tech talent needed for unique Estonian government project

The tiny Baltic country of Estonia and its small population of 1.3 million are off the radar for the majority of expat professionals.

The vast majority of expat professionals seeking a new, exciting job may not even have heard of Estonia, much less decided on it as a desirable expatriate location, but a select few in the tech sector may already be there! Since the 1990s, the country has been chasing its dream of a fully digitised society with all government services banded together on a single online platform. Launched in 1997, the programme is regarded as the beginning of the evolution of the ‘e-state’, with everything from filing taxes through document signing, prescription ordering and voting to allowing expats to become e-residents all linked and all online.

The entire, amazing programme is in-country at present, but will be linked via its own cloud to Estonian embassies across the world. Japan, Cyprus and Finland are all studying the programme’s application in their own countries and are working to build e-tax systems into their own software. Several are borrowing the Estonian ID card programme which gives each citizen an ID used for everything from recording votes and tracking social security issues to disaster response.

As the unique system evolves, it’s creating a need for more designers, more engineers, more programmers, more testers, more web developers, more copywriters, more social media experts and more architects. In itself, it’s a creator of top talent tech jobs, giving innovative experts the opportunity to take part in a unique social experiment intended to be in use worldwide once it’s proven in large-scale operations. According to experts, the system is a trailblazer as well as an early example of what government will look like in the hopefully not too distant future.

For those disinclined to trust any online innovation due to the risks of hacking and worse, Estonian experts point to their blockchain technology and its aim of ensuring no-one – not even the government – will be able to successfully manipulate the data and remain undiscovered. For example, the e-voting system has never been compromised – an assurance the USA might be envious of at this moment in time. The only problem with the system’s further development is that translating its function into a suitable form for a large county with many millions of people and vastly more complex legalities and requirements hasn’t yet been examined. Adapting to multi-languages may cause problems, as may myriads of different departments and ever-changing laws, but at this stage in the tech revolution, the innovative talent is out there and are be able to envisage a future where government in its entirety is simply a website.