Europe | Tech Skills Gap a Myth?

It’s often claimed we are suffering an IT skills crisis of epic proportions: just recently the European Commission announced that by 2015 there will be an estimated shortfall of 700,000 IT professionals across Europe.

And yet, academics have told TechRepublic there is little hard evidence of a shortage of  IT workers, as neither pay levels nor employment rates for IT professionals have reached the levels that might be seen in a skills crisis.

Pay levels for IT workers in the UK over the past eight years or so have not undergone the large shifts you would expect to see in an industry suffering from a skills crisis, says Dr Jonathan Liebenau, reader in Technology Management at the London School of Economics.

“In looking at historic wages we don’t see the sort of fluctuations that would support the argument that employers are finding it consistently difficult to find people,” he said.

“There’s a consistent setting of a baseline where IT people are paid no more than accountants or lower, middle-level employees of a legal office in a large firm, or other such skilled workers.”…

Source:

Read more @ Is the tech skills crisis just a myth? | TechRepublic.

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