the Labour Market Survey Report - Council of European ...

Executive Summary
The current state of the IT Practitioner * workforce within the European Union is assessed, with the
position in four Member States being studied in some detail, in particular through review of the most
recent national analyses and examination of levels of employment of the core technical communities
from official statistics over a five year period.
The report examines:
• the scale of the IT Practitioner (“ITP”) labour market;
• the economic and policy contexts;
• the nature and structure of this labour market, and its quantitative position and recent trends in
more detail in Germany, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom;
• initial comparisons between Member States of certain aspects of this labour force, and the role
of migration;
• the challenges of estimating skill shortages, in particular into the future; and
• four employment growth scenarios, to provide insights into future supply challenges.
The two other significant analyses of the European level position are reviewed in some depth, and
an analysis and forecasting approach was adopted for the study that overcomes certain of their
limitations.
Levels of employment in the four countries selected are presented from Eurostat holdings of national
Labour Force Survey official statistics in two occupational areas (“Computing Professionals” and
“Computer Associate Professionals”) over a five year period. While these figures are generally
noticeably below the “headline” figures assumed within recent national employer surveys (which have
often covered - all occupations in - the supply sector), they are more meaningful in representing the
scale of the core technical communities requiring the hard technical skill needs on which public policy
development in relation to IT Practitioner skills must primarily focus.
Levels and recent trends of a number of aspects of this workforce are reported, and the official figures
suggest noticeable differences between the four Member States examined, in relation to, for example:
• the level of female employment in this work;
• the age profile of the ITP workforce;
• the amount of self-employment within the workforce, and
• the share of employment within the supply (IS Industry) sector.
While this data suffers from certain differences of classification – in particular concerning the IT Practitioner
occupations – between countries, and the findings need further verification, the trends and certain
ratios remain meaningful, and significant national differences suggest the need for further exploration.
* In this study, IT Practitioners include both IT (“Informatics”) Professionals and non-professional dedicated IT
workers. They do not include either electronic engineers or Telecommunications workers (the study is not of ICT
Practitioners) or IT End-Users who make use of IT in their own work.