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

1. Introduction
This Study was initiated by the CEPIS President in Spring, 2001, in response to concern within the
Council – not least in relation to the potential market for European Certification for Informatics
Professionals (EUCIP) – about the lack of adequate understanding of the nature, size and likely
development of the labour market for those with IT Practitioner skills within Europe. Such figures as
were available had arisen largely from the work of the International Data Corporation (IDC), and the
estimates, both for present levels of employment and for future development, were felt by some within
the CEPIS community to be implausibly large.
The work on the IT Practitioners’ labour market in the United Kingdom that had been reported in
Skills99 (ITNTO/AISS, 1999) was recognised to be a relatively comprehensive and robust analysis of the
position there, and the CEPIS Executive Committee felt it would be desirable to explore the feasibility of
extending that approach to an attempt to develop a summary of the position of this labour market within
other Member States, and so within Europe as a whole.
The work was therefore commissioned as a feasibility study with a modest budget, and CEPIS proposed
that it should explore in some detail the labour market in four Member States (Germany, Ireland, Sweden
and the United Kingdom), with a view to extending the work – should feasibility be proved – to all other
Member States, preferably with EU Commission funding.
The strategic importance of ICT skills at the European level was recognized in March 2002, by Erkki
Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, in his Foreword to the
2002 edition of the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO):
“Despite the current consolidation phase within the ICT sector, one of the biggest concerns
of European enterprises remains that of finding employees with ICT and e-business skills. To
address this challenge, the Enterprise Directorate-General of the Commission has established in
September 2001 an “ICT Skills Monitoring Group”, composed of representatives of all Member
States, to analyse demand for ICT and e-business skills in the EU and to monitor the policies and
the actions designed to match demand with supply. EITO has strongly contributed to this debate,
as the figures published in the EITO Yearbook 2001 became a point of reference for the discussion
on the ICT skills shortage”.
The CEPIS leadership shares the challenging aspiration of Commissioner Liikanen that measures need
to be taken to ensure that Europe will gain a leading position in the development and use of the strategic
Information and Communication Technologies, and its valuable development work for EUCIP is already
a significant step in that direction. However, as indicated in the Preface, CEPIS believes that future policymaking
on IT Practitioner skills in Europe must be developed on a more objective and sound factual
basis about the labour market than has been possible before.
This study was carried out largely over the same period as the ICT Skills Monitoring Group’s initial phase
of work, and will enable CEPIS to make a valuable input into the work of that Group.
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