European Commission backs new e-skills body

Leading IT vendors, training firms and certification bodies have joined forces with the European Commission in an attempt to develop solutions to Europe's growing IT skills crisis.

The new e-Skills Industry Leadership Board will co-operate with the European Commission and consists of representatives from a range of stakeholders, including Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, exam bodies CompTIA and Exin, and IT training provider Global Knowledge.

Richard Pryor-Jones, EMEA President at Global Knowledge, said that the aim of the new group was to provide a forum for all the relevant bodies capable of addressing the IT skills crisis to trade ideas and initiatives. "We want to reflect on what is happening in different countries and start to establish some best practice sharing across different countries and companies," he explained. "The aim will be to pick out some of the best skills programmes and try to spread them out for wider adoption."

He added that the new board would aim to have some recommendations back to the European Commission by the autumn and then seek backing to roll out some of the programmes from both the European Union and individual companies. "We will focus on practical delivery ideas and the board will be steeped in a practicality, rather than all the conceptual stuff, which is perhaps where some of the existing IT skills initiatives have fallen down."

In particular, Pryor-Jones said that the board would focus on initiatives designed to make IT more appealing as a career choice. "I don’t think we need anymore qualifications," he observed. "We need to address why people don’t find IT sexy and why even computer science graduates are leaving the sector. We will look at schemes that can address those issues."

The European Commission is increasingly keen to back such initiatives, according to Pryor-Jones. "The EC sees this as a pure and simple competition issue," he said. "They are seeing skills shortages across the continent and salaries going up as a result and they realise they are in danger of losing more and more business to rival economies with lower cost structures as a result."

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