Skills for Innovation: introducing the main results from an empirica / IDC e-Skills Study funded by the European Commission
08 February 2010
After the crisis, the e-skills gap is looming in Europe.
empirica GmbH (www.empirica.com, www.eskills-monitor.eu) and IDC EMEA Government Insights have just published a report funded by the European Commission DG ENTR, entitled "ANTICIPATING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUPPLY AND DEMAND OF E-SKILLS IN EUROPE 2010-2015" in which they anticipate that the EU labour market may face an excess demand of 384,000 ICT practitioners by 2015 if we return to the growth rate and development of IT innovation experienced before the crisis ('Back to normal' scenario).
The number of ICT professionals in Europe was 4.7 million in 2007 and is forecasted to be between 4.95 and 5.26 million in 2015 depending on five foresight scenarios. Accordingly the e-skills gap, or unfilled vacancies, will in the 'Back to normal' scenario amount to almost 8% in 2015 of existing ICT practitioners. Depending on the scenario chosen the unfilled vacancies will range between 1.7% and 13% of existing occupations by 2015.
Empirica and IDC EMEA Government Insights have developed five foresight scenarios for Europe including a "back to normal" scenario, which describes how the labour market for ICT practitioners will evolve if we get back onto the previous, pre-crisis trajectories in terms of growth rates, the number of computer science students and graduates and the role of ICT-based innovation as a driving factor of European economic development. Contrasting with this scenario, they analysed four alternative paths varying the main factors that influence the demand and supply for e-skills: GDP growth, the pace of the economic recovery, the ICT innovation rate, ICT policies and the attractiveness of ICT jobs and careers in general. The variations in these factors were inputs to a predictive model they have developed and which is based in particular on historically observable elasticities and dependencies. The report was commissioned by the European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry.
The key results of this study are revealed here:
The report in full can be found here:
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