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

Recent policy responses to skill shortages in ICT in Ireland, Germany and the UK have included
arrangements to accelerate work permit applications for overseas (beyond the EEA) applicants with
ICT skills. France has been operating a simplified admission system for computer specialists since
1998.
Migration within the European Union has been increasing steadily over recent years, and is now of
growing significance to a number of Member State labour markets. Table 4 (from OECD Employment
Outlook, 2001) shows the overall position of Intra-European mobility of EU citizens (for all occupations)
in 1997, and gives a feel for the flows between countries. This migration is growing, and will undoubtedly
continue to grow.
OECD held a seminar in June 2001 on International Mobility of Highly Skilled Workers (“Human
Resources in Science and Technology” (HRST)). The proceedings of the meeting, published early in
2002 (OECD 2002), reported on the work. The seminar had three main objectives:
• to provide data on the scale and characteristics of flows and stocks of skilled and highly skilled
foreign workers in OECD Member countries and certain non-member countries, to assess the
quality of the available data and concepts used and to help improve their comparability;
• to analyse the mobility of skilled workers and “HRST” and their impact on the economy through
case studies covering most of the major regions that send and receive these workers;
• to examine appropriate migration policies for facilitating the mobility of skilled workers in ways
that are beneficial both to “receiving” and “sending” countries.
The studies showed that, while it is difficult to measure the international mobility of skilled workers,
there is every reason to believe that these flows rose substantially during the 1990s. This being the case,
mobility of “HRST” has a major impact on countries’ performance in the field of science and technology
and therefore on growth. However, these effects remain unequally distributed, especially between
sending countries (mostly developing countries) and receiving countries. As a result, policies aimed at
facilitating the recruitment and mobility of highly skilled workers, in particular migration policies, must
endeavour to ensure a fairer distribution of benefits.
Mobility between Member States – and different countries in general - in certain occupational areas
(in particular in professions which involve elements of safety risks for Society) is often constrained
by the fact that certain governments regulate both the use of professional “title” and in some cases,
the practice of the profession. Thus, for example, most countries regulate the practice of various
medical professions, and most countries regulate certain safety-related aspects of engineering (e.g.
design of dams, aircraft, gas installations, etc.). This inevitably involves specific education, training and
experience requirements that pose barriers to mobility for professionals from other countries who have
not “gone through that system”. The EU Commission has striven to tackle these barriers, and there exist
certain Directives that require “receiving” Member States to minimize barriers to access to practice for
experienced professionals from other Member States, where they have been practising in essentially
the same area. The current set of Directives (some of which apply to specific professions while some
involve a “general systems” coverage of a range of others), are currently undergoing review, and a new
set of arrangements is expected to come into force within a year or so which will specify the migration
processes for professionals between Member States in a consistent way.
IT Professionals are generally not subject to these barriers. This is probably because the IT profession
is relatively young, and there has not been a history of regulation of practice that creates such barriers
in the first place. However, in view of the increasing importance of IT systems to many (most) areas of
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