IT skills in short supply

Citation

(1999), "IT skills in short supply", Education + Training, Vol. 41 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.1999.00441aab.022

IT skills in short supply

IT skills in short supply

Keywords European Union, Information technology, Skills, Vocational training

Around 320,000 jobs were unfilled in the information-technology sector in Europe at the end of 1997, and the figure could reach 1.6 million by 2002.

So warns a report entitled Information Technology Skills: the Impending Impact on Businesses in Europe, by International Data Corporation. The report was considered at the European Summit on Employment and Training in the Information Society, which brought together top-level decision makers from politics, business and European institutions.

European Commissioner Padraig Flynn said that information technology is the biggest industry in Europe, and growing faster than the rest of the economy. It created around 300,000 jobs between 1995 and 1997. Information and communication technology firms consistently reported that they could not find enough people with the right skills, yet some EU member states were cutting back on technical places in universities.

Commission president Jacques Santer said urgent action was needed to increase the number of university places in IT, increase use of the Internet in schools and prevent some of the best IT brains from leaving Europe for the United States.

Bernard Vergnes, president of Microsoft Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said that information technology was given too little priority in the education process.

The conference agreed that government, industry and European institutions all had a role to play in helping to solve the problem. Governments must ensure that technical know-how is taught throughout the education system. Industry must invest more in training its own people, promote partnerships with schools and universities and make IT specialists and training materials available for teaching purposes. The EU must link the efforts of indstry, employment agencies and education institutions, and set up a high-level advisory group to consider the skill deficit.