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Life at Work in the Information Economy Full Text dictionary
Increase in Skill Needs creates Skill Shortage
The adoption of ICT in enterprises is creating two types of skill needs. The first relates to a variety of foundation skills, such as the ability to learn, to communicate, and to analyse and solve problems, all of which are essential to work environments that rely on rapid innovation, and the interpersonal exchange and creation of knowledge. Beyond such skills, however, are the technical skills related to ICT itself, the need for which extends well beyond the ICT sector to the economy as a whole.
Where the technologies are most broadly in use, skill shortages particularly in the technical support skills surrounding both hardware and software applications are acute, if difficult to quantify. This, in turn, is a brake on economic growth for enterprises that would otherwise adopt the technologies' applications more readily. Three problems relating to the skills shortage are of particular significance. The first of these is the debate over labour migration. The availability of technical skills in developing countries could be used to meet the skill needs of industrialized countries. On the positive side, migrant workers benefit from the greater experience and higher wages that migration can bring, and sending countries can benefit from the remittances their expatriates send home. It is also true that countries such as China, India and Viet Nam have all benefited from the networks their expatriates have created outside the country, and also from the skills and experiences they repatriate when they do return home. For receiving countries, of course, reliance on foreign labour is a way of overcoming skill shortages in the short term.
On the negative side, however, the outward migration of the technically skilled can result in a brain drain, depriving developing countries of these scarce skills. For example, possibly all of India's annual graduates in ICT-related core skills could be in demand in industrialized countries. For receiving countries, meanwhile, there are two problems. First, some evidence suggests that the attractiveness of skilled migrant labour in the United States comes from the lower pay that employers can offer them relative to domestic labour. Additionally, there is concern in both the United States as well as in European Union countries that recourse to foreign labour might detract from the need for the training and retraining of the existing workforce. This is particularly the case where emerging skill shortages coexist with still relatively high unemployment.
A second and related problem is the ageing workforce in many OECD countries. This implies, first of all, that the majority of "tomorrow's workforce" is, in fact, already on the job. The promotion of lifelong learning and the retraining of the existing workforce need therefore to be policy objectives applied to those already at work. Equipping workers with ICT-related skills, therefore, will need to be specifically targeted to the needs of older workers.
A third problem is the possibility of a skills polarization emerging as the technologies are taken up by enterprises. On the high end, highly skilled workers using ICT-related skills intensively on the job may have broad career options and command high salaries. But there remain many jobs in the networking economy that are low-skilled and low-paid. The polarization of skills could also reinforce the gender-based segmentation of the labour market.