Even though the European Commission admits the annual growth of IT vacancies by 100,000, the hectic and impetuous development of innovative technologies leads to the situations when the demand for e-skills significantly exceeds the supply. Analysts are alarmed that the European education system fails to supply sufficient IT skills to satisfy the current, not to mention the future, demands. According to research company Empirica, the EU will have up to 900,000 open vacancies and only 100,000 ICT graduates by 2015.
“I am worried, as supply has become a bottleneck for growth in the tech sector, creating a leaky pipeline that threatens to hamper European innovation and global competitiveness,” says Antonio Tajani, VP of European Commission. “This is more important than ever in the current economic context. And it is crucial to increase creativity which will favor entrepreneurship and new start-ups”. He stresses that young people have to appreciate and master the aspects of today’s digital world in order to prevent e-skills collapse in the EU.
The Information Daily reports that Europe is facing growing unemployment with 23 million jobless people. Among youth the unemployment rate is 21%. This year’s Report from the International Labor Organization has observed that the mismatch of skills is deteriorating as a consequence of high unemployment rates. The new jobs require competences that the unemployed Europeans do not possess. As such, internal labor market within the EU dysfunctions and is unable to react quickly and adequately to acceleration of the economic activity.
What adds up to the problem is that Europeans are reluctant to move around the EU in search of employment. There’re two main reasons for this: firstly, there’s no unified and standardized education certification within the EU and, secondly, the labor legislation differs from country to country.
In order to fill in the gap between demand and supply of e-skills, the European Commission launched the so-called Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs in spring 2013. The Coalition’s goal is to create more workplaces in IT, fund digital startups and design curricula to increase qualification of ICT specialists. But are these steps timely enough to provide EU with the missing 800,000 e-skilled professionals within just 2 years? Or will it have to source the ICT workforce in nearshore countries such as Ukraine that alone delivers almost 20,000 students with IT and software engineering skills every year and ranks 4th globally by the number of certified IT specialists?
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Viktor Bogdanov
Quelle/Source: Business 2 Community, 23.07.2013
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