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

The European Union figures were assembled from estimates in six country sub-groups:
• Germany
• France
• Italy
• Spain
• UK and
• “Other Western Europe”
for which the forecasting proceeded by assuming growth rates (separately) for each year to 2003.
The IDC figures for supply also suffer from the fundamental lack of realism in assuming that supply
largely arises from those graduating from ICT-related Higher Education courses. As Mason (2000)
confirms, “this approach places too much weight on the supply of new entrants from the full-time
education system and too little on alternative sources of new IT skills”.
A more meaningful and “relate-able” analysis was carried out for the Career-Space consortium in early
2001 by the labour market expert within IBM United Kingdom (Career-Space, 2001). This study used:
• OECD estimates of total employment in the ICT supply sectors
• forecasts of overall economic activity within most Member States from the E3M3 model of
ERECO, and
• estimates of employment of ICT occupations from total employment in the supply sectors based
on the occupational structure within the U.K, using 9 SOC90 categories that were deemed to
cover all the 13 “generic job profiles” defined by the Career-Space initiative.
This approach produced significantly lower estimates of both current & recent and forecast future
employment of ICT Practitioners in Europe. However, it suffers from errors arising from assumptions
associated with:
• estimating the structure of occupation sector employment levels within the UK, and
• estimating the total European level based on the assumption that the occupation sector
structure in other EU countries is identical with that in the UK
The EU total was made up from figures for 14 Member States (Luxembourg was not treated separately
within the E3M3 economic model), and the forecasting to 2004 proceeded by assuming annual average
growth rates, separately, for each sector-occupation cell defined for the study.
The report concluded with proposals for follow-on work: it forecast only employment levels, and did not
attempt to estimate shortage figures.
The mappings between the occupational classifications used in these two analyses and that used for this
report are shown in Annex A.
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| C E P I S I.T. PRACTITIONER SKILLS IN EUROPE | Section 5