Expert Survey on Monitoring e-Skills Demand and Supply in Europe: Is Europe facing an e-Skills gap – Yes or No?
Is it only a myth that Europe lacks the IT skills needed? Or why do so few enterprises actually report having trouble to find the right people? Do we trust statistics that show Germany has only little more than half the number of Science/Maths/Computing graduates than the United Kingdom, and only two thirds of the figure in France? That Poland has 250 *annual* graduates in this field per 1000 IT specialists in the workforce – while the Netherlands produce only 32 per 1000? And what will the effect of the economic crisis be on the demand and the supply of IT skills?
What is your opinion? Please add your comment!
Where possible, please provide empirical evidence and data supporting your opinion and arguments
In the most recent Issue Paper on “Recognizing Value Credentials” of 27 February 2009 the IT industry working group 6 on “Skills and Lifelong Learning” has clearly stated that Europe is facing an “e-Skills gap”, i.e. a serious and increasing undersupply of ICT practitioners in the market which is increasingly not reaching the demand levels in industry and among businesses. By way of quoting Michael Gorriz, euroCIO President with a statement from 29 January 2009 they state that
“companies both on the information technology supply and user side have an increasing need for ICT skilled professionals.
Figures from 2008 indicated the demand to reach 250,000 by 2010. Only 180,000 are likely to be available. The economic downturn will probably release the situation. However, the long-term trend of a shortfall poses a threat to job opportunities and Europe’s competitiveness in the globalised world.
Therefore, it is critical for the success of European industries to re-skill Europe’s workforce for the needs of the knowledge-based economy. Industry-based qualifications and certifications are key factors in keeping European industries competitive. This fact needs to be recognized.”
However, most recent official European statistics on e-Skills – providing data up until the years 2006 and 2007 – show a steady increase of e-Skills supply (ICT practitioners in the workforce and students graduating from university in related subjects) over the past years and not a massive drop off and decrease of student enrolments and graduations from university and IT practitioners in the workforce in this area.
Recent European e-Skills demand figures from the survey in 2007 also show that only less than 4 percent of European companies had hard-to-fill vacancies for jobs requiring ICT specialist skills, and only 7.2% tried to recruit personnel with ICT specialist skills.
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Source: Eurostat 2007
Given the public attention that employers’ claims about the e-skills gap have gained recently, one might have expected a higher share of enterprises that state difficulties in this regard. However, this figure does not give any information about how many positions had to remain unoccupied since the number of “hard-to-fill vacancies” within the responding enterprise is not further specified, nor is it further differentiated whether these vacancies were eventually filled.
From these European statistical data one can not necessarily derive that Europe is suffering from or will be facing a very severe “e-Skills gap”.
ICT Practitioners in the European workforce (ISCO 213 and 312: Computer Professionals and Computer Associate Professionals) from 1995 – 2007
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Source: Eurostat: Labour Force Surveys
Graduation from tertiary education according to ISCED97 in science, mathematics and computing from 1998 - 2006
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Source: Eurostat
What is your opinion? Is Europe facing an e-Skills gap or not? Please add your comment!
If you have any at hand, please provide empirical evidence and data supporting your opinion and arguments.
There is smoke so there should be fire, though not visible to the naked
eye. Forecasting or speculations are all scientific basis. People who produce reports are all accredited academics. So one cannot reject such
speculations as baseless. Any branch of Social sciences belong to a positive nature of science and not normative. The laws and decisions always depend upon certain clauses, though it may not add phrases like
….provided or like …….other things being equal. Yet, there are clauses and phrases. A subject expert can read such phrases beyond or between the lines, as she/he has the capacity to understand the situation or environment. So, one can have good faith and believe, if not the statistics, the concept or the underlying principle.
Great article, thanks for the share. Blog bookmarked
All of the study I have seen is fairly outdated nowadays since economic downturn has overwright the trends. I have just experimental information via the Association’s mebers ( led by me ) from recent time, and relevant only for hungary. Before the crises we have had around 4800 shortage of ICT practicioners, based on headhunters and jobportals open search numbers (wo duplication), which had been grown since 2002 from 1300 at that time. The graduated students number in ICT has stagnated also last years, and since the market growths, the gap has increased, since forign (especially transilvanian) ICT knowladge employee who came, and other professionalist who had changed can not covered the missmatch.
However it is important that the structure of ICT practitioners missing is havily different was from what the universities and othe training providers tried to cover. So, first step should have been ICT industry involvement in ICT education curricula strategies. (eg. low or middle level Windows deployment engineer was enough, but JAVA master or BEA professionals or even CRM knowladge was lack of on the market.
Since crisis hit us also, this has been changed a bit. We estimates the gap around half of the original (~2000 person) but the structures of the mismatch has changed a bit in good direction since some of the companies has fired or erased some of well skilled employee who can cover the missing professional gaps partly.
My (and most of our member companies professionals) feeling is that after the crises, the market will get an impulse and growth rate will be higher and the demand will increase rapidly, so the gap will increase also rapidly, since the education can not follow so fast. this can cause real problem in the industry.
Other thing is that since ICT up to date knowladge is changing more freqvently than others, those who has been unemplyed during crises and can not practice their profession, got an unusable knowladge, and need more education that they can come back to ICT HR market competitivly.
Tamas Klotz
CEO-Secretary General
Hungarian ICT Association
[...] In the most recent Issue Paper on “Recognizing Value Credentials” of 27 February 2009 the IT industry working group 6 on “Skills and Lifelong Learning” has clearly stated that Europe is facing an “e-Skills gap“. [...]
[...] Project Documents « Is Europe facing an e-Skills gap? [...]
I believe the “real ICT practitioners” bottlenecks will be found at much more specific and detailed levels, i.e. for instance certain types of network integration specialists, high-end SAP-platform programmers or 3-D graphics application designers. There can easily in a fast evolving industry of fluid standards be severe shortages of particular specialists, even as the broader “computer graduate category” is expanding.
At the same time, it is clear that the current economic crisis will have an impact on both skills supply/demand quite possibly beyond the immediate business cycle. It is for instance unlikely that a large number of the most talented mathematically trained “quants” will continue to enter the financial sector to the degree we have seen it since the mid-1990s.
I am maybe not entirely clear about what the table shows, but it seems to me that the discussion of the table data is possibly completely and utterly misguided.
First of all, a population of “all enterprises with more than 10empl” is a very large one and it would seem to me that 7.2% of all EU companies (with more than 10empl) tried to recruit an IT specialist is quite a reasonable number – many companies like restaurants/construction companies etc. really will never need a full-time dedicated ICT practitioner. It’s simply not a part of their business and what they do. However, the table shows that 3.4% of all companies (which had an ICT specialist need and consequently tried to recruit one) had “hard-to-fill vacancies”. The way I read that table is that almost 50% (3.4%/7.2%) of EU companies with a need for an ICT specialist had trouble finding one. If this is indeed the correct interpretation of the table, then it is a very alarming finding and indeed corresponds COMPLETELY with widespread employer perceptions that ICT specialists are hard to find in Europe today.
….. OK, in fact, after a little search of the original Eurostat data at the Information Society Statistics Policy Indicators at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=1996,45323734&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&screen=welcomeref&close=/isoc/isoc_pi&language=en&product=EU_MASTER_information_society&root=EU_MASTER_information_society&scrollto=28, it turns out that indeed my interpretation of the data is correct.
The “Percentage of enterprises who had hard-to-fill vacancies for jobs requiring ICT specialist skills, during 2006″ as a share of “Percentage of enterprises which recruited or tried to recruit personnel for jobs requiring ICT specialist skills” is on average 47% in the EU-27, rising to 66% in the Czech Republic and Lithuania, and dropping to “only” 31% in the UK.
Correspondingly, in my opinion that the text discussion of the table data and indeed much of the content of this blog is simply nonsense!
COMPLETELY contrary to the blog statement of “From these European statistical data one can not necessarily derive that Europe is suffering from or will be facing a very severe “e-Skills gap”, the e-skills shortage facing EU companies today (at least in 2006 data) is VERY real and Eurostat data – when truthfully presented at least – shows this quite clearly!
J.F. Kirkegaard, Peterson Institute For International Economics
Good morning, if data extracted from “Annual graduations from science, math, computing” domains are not showing a gap in E-Skills, it would be interested to collect data from other domains than science where E-skills is also needed. The gap may be in other fields where ICT is also needed: ICT skills should be developped in other domain to be combined with other skills. For instance medical activities requested to use informatics to collect and analyze information for diagnostics, and there are many examples where the use of a computer is requested. Thank you. (Sophie Barbedette, ORACLE)
The comment provides a reference to the top line figure of a surplus of 70000 ICT professionals by 2010 (i.e. the difference between the 250000 demanded and the supply of 180000 forecast) from the CEPIS Foresights study, as those who have read the study will clearly see. This surplus was only forecast in the case of a very favourable economic climate, together with a positive pace of ICT development and low offshoring. The scenario presented was labeled as ‘Renaissance’. The reader should always bear in mind that these figures were forecast based on a foresight scenario modeled on positive economic climates and paces of ICT innovations. The scenario which is most relevant to the current environment labeled ‘Dark days’ shows no shortage of practitioners. This foresight scenario, which proved to be quite accurate does not get any reference. It is imperative that all reports that quote figures should outline at a top level the assumptions on which they were based, and the overall context of the report from which they were derived
(Julian Seymour, CEPIS)