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

- “Skills Framework for the Information Age” (SFIA) - developed with active steer from industry, has
considerable merit, but needs even greater buy-in. Details can be found at www.e-skillsnto.org.uk/sfia/.
The only framework of an international character developed thus far arose from an initiative by a number
of large European ICT companies, which led to the development of the “career-space” framework. Since
this is intended first and foremost for careers promotion purposes, it is a relatively “coarse-grained”
framework (with thirteen generic job profiles, including Communications specialisms), and it is only 1-
dimensional – i.e. it does not directly reflect the fact that different occupations exist at different levels of
technical complexity and responsibility. More details can be found at www.career-space.com.
It is important to recognize that – for a fast moving set of industrial sectors and occupations – the task
of tracking development in a robust quantitative way will always be very difficult. All occupational
frameworks in such an environment need to have review and updating built in. Even more difficult in
that situation is the task of forecasting future skill needs, both in terms of “competence-content” and of
development of numbers required in the labour market as a whole, since trend data is lost if a single
occupational framework cannot be sustained.
Probably the most important principle to be understood when trying to develop a sound view of IT
Practitioner skills is to recognize the fundamental distinction between the sector and occupational
perspective. IT (supplier) companies arise from, and are strongly influenced by, the abilities of the
“technical people”. But such companies generally also employ people with a range of other skills, in
support operations of various kinds (e.g. accounts people, admin. people, marketing and sales people,
personnel staff, general managers, office cleaners, etc.). In addition, organizations in most other parts
of the economy – e.g. banks, manufacturing companies, local authorities, hospitals (and other health
care operations), airlines, retail businesses, government departments, etc. - all make considerable
use of Information Technology, and in doing so, generally have “IT departments” that employ teams
of IT Practitioners. In many countries, the number of IT practitioners employed in these “IT user
organizations” is greater than the numbers employed in IT (supplier) companies. Table A-1 shows the
structure in its simplest form: a 2 x 2 matrix. The numbers of people employed in the 4 boxes show the
basic profile of a country’s IT practitioner community.
Note that this report makes no attempt to describe the skills position of “IT End-Users” – the (millions)
whose main job is not IT, but who use IT - often very considerably - in their work. While many “End-
Users” are extremely capable “drivers” of powerful software tools, they are not IT practitioners until they
shift over (as many hundreds of thousands undoubtedly do within Europe each year) into employing
these skills essentially for the benefit of others.
Telecommunications and Electronics sectors and occupations and Convergence
Recent developments in digital technology have accelerated the convergence of a series of related
technologies and markets. This convergence is very important and will further increase the impact of
these technologies on most aspects of our lives. It is also introducing further complexity into attempts
to clarify the labour markets involved.
The approach of this study is, while recognizing these realities, to emphasise the occupational view
of the world, since, while new products and services will continue to spawn fast-growing new sectors
which will need a range of different technical skills, the key underlying occupational differences – e.g.
between software development and electronics design and technical skills - will remain.
C E P I S I.T. PRACTITIONER SKILLS IN EUROPE | Annex A | 95