The Austrian Chamber of Commerce recently reported a need for 10,000 additional IT specialists. This is not a surprise, the shortage of skilled workers is permanent.
Vienna.
Austria was at the top of the EU 2018 comparison for the shortage of skilled workers in the IT and telecommunications sector. Only Romania and the Czech Republic had an even greater need. Figures for 2019 are not yet available.
Three quarters of the domestic companies stated that they had a bottleneck here – the EU average was 58 percent, in Germany 69 percent, according to the figures published today by the EU statistics office Eurostat. Spain (27 percent) and Greece (38 percent) had the smallest shortage of skilled workers in the industry.
In Great Britain, long before Brexit, 50 percent of the companies surveyed were looking for IT specialists. In non-EU country Norway it was only 45 percent, while in EU country Sweden 72 percent of companies were on the lookout.
The Austrian Chamber of Commerce (WKÖ) had given the alarm only a month ago. 10,000 highly qualified IT staff were still missing. The direct and indirect loss of value added per vacant position amounts to 160,000 euros per year, for a total of 1.6 billion euros, said IT ZB professional association spokesman Martin Zandonella.
A known problem
The outcry that there is a shortage of IT specialists in this country is not new. Already in the 1990s
was complained of at regular intervals, especially by company representatives and their professional representatives, the shortage of skilled workers. Lamentation had always manifested itself as instrumental lamentation. In addition, the establishment of several universities of applied sciences in Germany has opened up a number of new courses that have actually provided business with IT experts directly away from the university.
Since then, figures have been regularly published – sometimes even every six months – which should be used with great caution due to the fluctuation ranges. The estimates of how many IT specialists are actually missing should therefore be handled with great caution. At the beginning of the 2000s, the numbers fluctuated between 10,000 and 100,000 missing IT staff. Later, even before the financial crisis in 2008, the estimates were estimated at over 30,000 open columns for IT experts in Germany, after which the number had dropped sharply to well below 10,000 IT experts. With the recovery phase of the economy, the numbers were raised again generously.
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