Where are the saving foreign-born IT knights?

The IT industry is suffering from both an acute and structural skills shortage, as we at IT&Telekomföretagen showed in a report last spring. In the absence of qualified skills at home, many players are looking beyond Sweden's borders, hoping to fill the gaps from there. At the same time, many politicians are pinning their hopes on the IT industry to help provide jobs for the many migrants coming to Sweden.

To the extent that there are many with an IT background among the migrants, this should be a winning combination. However, a first hurdle is to know how many of them have an IT background. In terms of the category of labor migrants, we know, but this is about those who are already recruited to the Swedish industry and therefore does not solve the problem for the companies that need to recruit new ones. As for the very large group of asylum seekers, we simply do not know. Neither when people apply for nor when they are granted asylum is there any form of registration of their educational or professional background. However, a collaborative project between the Swedish Migration Agency and the Swedish Public Employment Service is said to be underway to achieve just that.

A second obstacle is that the profile of those seeking asylum does not necessarily match that of the IT companies. A driven, self-motivated Java developer (preferably with good English and Swedish skills and preferably also housing) is not at all the same as a non-Swedish network technician from Damascus, who has to deal with a traumatic escape and to find his way socially in Sweden.

Unfortunately, the distance between the companies seeking foreign-born skills and the authorities responsible for the integration and matching of foreign-born workers is very long. There is a need for both more knowledge about the occupational profile of foreign-born workers and meeting places where the focus is on the industry's skills shortage, and not the authorities' need to solve an employment problem.

(See the report: "Acute and structural skills shortages in the IT and telecom sector")