An EC/Greek government event in Athens has heard that Greece needs to improve its IT skills education or miss out on a wider European opportunity.
“ICT can enhance all branches of the economy and create new jobs,” said Kostas HATZIDAKIS, Minister of Development and Competitiveness, Greece in a keynote speech at the event.
He said that during the next programming period his government would double its budget for innovation, create new incentives to expand youth entrepreneurship, and sign a national coalition for digital jobs for Greece. Greece offers a dramatic example of the skills gap in practise. While its overall unemployment rate remains the highest in Europe at over 24%, many world famous technology firms are lining up to hire staff to fill new jobs they are looking to create in Greece.
Many household names from the ICT industry are setting up operations in Greece. Microsoft recently set up a call centre, creating 750 jobs in the process. Huawei is considering opening an innovation centre in Athens. IBM has recently announced the creation of a centre of excellence for big data and business analytics, also in the Greek capital. HP is creating a call centre for its dealers and partners in the region, creating 100 jobs. And SAP has announced plans to create an Innovation & Value Engineering Centre in Greece.
They are attracted to Greece partly because of the country’s excellent reputation for training electronic engineers. But in spite of this, ICT jobs account for just 1.6% of total employment. The average for the EU is 3.4%, leaving Greece with one of the smallest ICT sectors – as a proportion of the wider economy - in Europe.
“While around a quarter of Greece’s workforce is unemployed, the number of ICT job vacancies is actually rising,” said John Higgins, Director General of DIGITALEUROPE. "We see this trend at the European level too – stubbornly high levels of general unemployment, but at the same time a shortage of applicants for technology-oriented positions. This is the skills gap that the technology industry is trying to help governments to address,” he added.
An estimated 1,200 ICT jobs remained unfilled in Greece last year, according to the researcher Empirica. That figure is expected to rise to 1,800 by 2020.