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

The findings of the NOP survey were also fed into a significant review of secondary research, carried
out by the Institute of Employment Studies at the University of Sussex (also in the first half of 2001) that
is written up as “An assessment of Skill Needs in Information and Communication Technology” (this is
the report of the UK Government’s “Skills Dialogue” work for these sectors). The five main conclusions
to emerge from this work were:
• Demand for professional ICT skills continues to expand (for both fundamental operating
systems and programming languages, as well as new Internet-related skills)
• Supply is starting to respond, as university output increases and other channels open up;
• Skill deficits still persist, through external recruitment shortages and internal skill gaps;
• However the worst of the recent skill shortage crisis appears to have passed, as demand slows
down and supply catches up; and
• Concern is switching from inadequacies in the quantity to the quality of skills supply.
From the data gathered for this study, as compared with the situation in some other EU Member States,
the Computing Professional (ISCO 213) community in the United Kingdom appears, over the second
half of the 1990s, to have had the following characteristics (see Section 4.6 and Annex E for detailed
charts):
• a comparatively low fraction of women in this employment (Figures 9 and E-1);
• above average in terms of the fraction of younger workers (Figures 10 and E-2);
• a relatively high percentage of Self-employed Computing Professionals (Figures 11 and E-5);
• below average in terms of share of employment within the IS Industry (i.e. IT supply companies)
(Figures 12 and E-4); and
• a relatively high %age of Computing Professionals in training (Figures 16 and E-8).
Overall, in terms of the fraction of the national employed population working in the ISCO 213 occupation
(there were no UK returns for ISCO 312), the position in the UK is understandably relatively strong in
the Computing Professional community – significant growth over recent years, and positioned second
overall behind Sweden.
Detailed analyses of the British Computing Professional workforce are provided in Annex E, together
with employment level scenarios relating to the four growth rates developed in Section 5.
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| C E P I S I.T. PRACTITIONER SKILLS IN EUROPE | Section 4