Addressing society needs
The massive investments in IT in general, and in networking technologies in particular, have created an unprecedented demand for IT professionals (the data was presented in paragraph 2.1.). From banking to leisure, retail to travel and government to charity all sectors now use ICT. Many organizations need more people now simply to make full use of the equipment they already have, let alone what is on the leading edge horizon. Moreover, a wide majority expects Internet spending to pick up in the next couple of years, which will fuel further ICT skills demand.
On the other hand the skills supply is falling. The number of young people is steadily declining right across the EU, due to reduced birth rates, and with increasing retirement rates, there will simply be fewer people available for work. Recognising this, several EU countries have relaxed job permit rules to allow in skilled ICT workers from outside the EU, and thousands have already arrived.
Total Networking Skills Shortage- An IDC White Paper, September 2005. As shown in the next table, real oportunities for finding ICT jobs will exist, even if all countries are experiencing unemployement.
Consequently, the undersupply of FTEs (full time equivalents) in 2005 of 57,668 is likely to represent an actual shortage of skilled people of around 230,000 in 2005, increasing to 615,000 skilled people by 2008. In percentage terms, IDC estimates that the total networking skills gap will increase from 6% in 2005 to 11.8% by 2008.
The established EU countries as a region have the lowest total networking skills gap in 2004 at 2.8% of demand, growing to 10.8% by 2008. For advanced networking skills, the gap increases from 5.4% in 2004 to 13.6% in 2008.
The region is still suffering from low economic growth and the highest unemployment rates in decades. However, other IDC studies have shown that organizations are starting to change focus from pure cost control to investing in technologies that can improve efficiencies in the long term and help grow the revenue line.
While the improvement overall in the IT markets is slow, IDC expects that this will accelerate over the period depicted and that increased demand will cause an even larger gap by 2008 - particularly as many students and graduates have turned away from IT-related studies in the past few years.
The EFTA countries, Norway and Switzerland, are seeing relatively larger gaps in 2004 at 5.9% for all networking skills and 7% for advanced networking skills but are growing less strongly to 8.7% and 11.6% in 2008 for all networking and advanced networking skills.