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

Annex A
Definitions, Datastructures and Limitations
Definitions: What are IT Practitioners and where do they work?
There are probably as many views as to what IT Practitioners are and do as there are people who take an
interest in this area. It is inevitable that readers of this report from different EU Member States will have
a range of particular perspectives. The different kind of work in (and around) labour markets, including
the work of those considering and developing:
• careers material,
• education and training approaches and programmes,
• professional formation and career development requirements, and
• salary surveys,
all require the assumption of a set of occupational definitions (with a greater or lesser detail of
skill/competence requirements) in the broad area of interest. These different focuses inevitably have
different requirements as to the amount of detail of skill requirements and the “granularity” of the
classification. For example, Salary surveys generally require information about a comparatively large
number of occupational categories, so that individual employers will learn about market conditions for
the categories they happen to use – this can result in many dozens of “job titles” being used for different
kinds of IT practitioners. On the other hand, careers material needs to paint a “broad brush” picture of
general areas of activity in an attractive way – here the number of types of IT practitioner would generally
be much lower – generally less than 10.
In addition to the range of application areas for occupational classifications, the speed of development
of the technology, of the tools, systems and methodologies arising from this and their penetration into
the marketplace have also played a role. As IT management and occupational analysts in different
organizations, contexts and countries have tried – over the last few decades - to distil structure from
the fast-changing picture, it is understandable that a number of different occupational frameworks have
emerged.
But from the point of view of sound analysis of the IT Practitioner labour market – of tracking
developments and understanding the labour market well enough that sensible decisions can be made,
both at the enterprise and at the public policy levels – the most important set of occupational frameworks
are those for which surveys (whether of employers or of individuals) have been carried out. Even
within a single country (e.g. the United Kingdom) a range of different frameworks have been used for
surveys (these are shown in Skills99). While there are broad similarities, the fact that the frameworks
used are not the same means that data gathered from the different surveys cannot generally be usefully
compared, and thus contribute to building up an overall picture enriched by evidence from all the
different surveys.
The great desirability of the use of a single (“unifying”) framework for all surveys (and ideally, for as many
other applications as possible) led to an initiative over the late 1990s within the UK to win wide support
for such a framework, built largely from the BCS’s Industry Structure Model. The resulting framework
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| C E P I S I.T. PRACTITIONER SKILLS IN EUROPE | Annex A