IT skilled shortage in Europe
According to the newspapers The India Times and the Daily Mirror, the European Union (EU) has agreed to allow 40,000 Indians to come and work in Europe, to solve the Information Technology (IT) shortage. As European countries are improving their economies, they find that they do not have enough IT skilled workers. A government official said: “We know that there is a shortage but we do not know that it is so severe. Without IT workers, we cannot improve our systems fast enough, especially when the global economy is changing now.”
The EU has proposed that 40,000 Indian workers will be admitted to Europe as part of the plan to boost export trade with India. Among these countries, U.K will accept 12,000, which is 30 per cent of the total allocation. Currently, a large number of these IT workers already arrived in Britain from India. According to EU officials, in return for allowing more Indian IT workers to come in and work, UK will be able to export more things to India in exchange.
The IT skills shortage is a major issue for companies in the UK, who have complained for years about the difficulties of recruiting and retaining qualified workers. Despite the economic recession of past few years, the IT sector continues to grow quickly. A government report estimates that in the next three years, UK will need more than 550,000 IT workers to fill IT and telecoms jobs. Some of these jobs are needed to replace the people who retire. But others are needed to fill new jobs, especially in the fast growing IT sectors.
The IT skills shortage in Europe is a result of several factors: Fewer students study Computer Science or related fields. In 2009, only 15,000 UK students studied IT as compared to 57,000 in 2001. Another factor is the obsolete training programs at universities. Many schools have not improved their training programs to meet the industry demands. At the moment, the biggest demand is in the areas of mobile device development, cloud computing, e-commerce, social networking and information system management. However, a majority of schools are still focusing on computing theories, data structures and programming languages. A company manager said: “We need more workers who understand service management for cloud computing but all applicants who applied to our company only have programming skills and no experience in service. That is why we have to hire IT workers from India and bring them here. In service business, you cannot outsource because they have to work with users and customers on a daily basis to understand their needs in order to support them.” Another manager added: “There is another area that has more significant shortage, is of people with higher-level skills such as software project management, requirements engineering, business analysis, and system architecture. These skills are currently not taught in our training programs. We cannot get enough of these workers.”
A university official admitted that they have not kept up with the global trend: “As more companies outsource their coding and testing, they need workers in integration, architecture and project manager but we are still focusing on training our students in the skills that no longer needed. Few years ago, most students left the engineering profession for jobs in finance and banking and now we have a surplus of banking and finance workers. The situation is getting worst with the retirement of many workers so we are left with an imbalanced workforce where demand is greater than supply in some areas. All of this occurring when our economy projects that the IT demand will continue to grow nearly 25% in the next ten years. Where can they find workers? The only solution is to bring workers from India and China in and that will keep many of our own people very unhappy.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
