01 April 2014:

In Europe the demand for ICT practitioners, with growth of around 4% a year is outstripping supply resulting in a shortage of 509,000 jobs in 2015 compared to 274,000 today. This figure could even increase to almost one million by 2020. This shortage is caused by lack of relevant e-skills. The bottlenecks are largest in the UK, Germany, and Italy – which together would account 60% of all vacancies in Europe. Many of these potential vacancies are likely to remain unfilled unless more is done to attract young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people. These are some of the key results from the continuous monitoring of the supply and demand of e-skills across Europe and the benchmarking of national policy initiatives and multi-stakeholder partnerships in the EU released today.

To fill these jobs, many Member States need to step up policy action. Urgent policy action and stakeholder initiatives are required and need to be undertaken to fill this gap. The good news is that policy activity in relation to e-skills has significantly increased at national level over the past five years. However, there are sharp differences between countries” says Werner B. Korte, director of empirica, the company which has been contracted by the Commission to carry out the research.

More information: http://www.eskills-monitor2013.eu/, http://www.eskills2013.eu/