No highways into the skills-demanding IT and telecom industry

IT and telecoms are, as usual, at the top of the list of industries with the greatest skills needs, according to the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise's recruitment survey published today. The ways in which the industry stands out are the large proportion of university graduates sought and the high degree of informal channels used in recruitment. International recruitment and cooperation with education providers are underutilized channels.

Almost a quarter of the companies in the IT&Telecom companies' membership were prevented from expanding due to a lack of skills. This can be seen from the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise's recruitment survey for 2015, which was published today. The survey, which was sent out to more than 6,000 companies, including 111 member companies of IT&Telecom companies, shows that 56 percent of both the total and the IT&Telecom companies had experienced difficulties in recruiting in recent months. However, there is a clear difference between the total and the IT&Telecom companies in terms of the impact that these recruitment difficulties have had: While 27% of the cases, in terms of the total, have led to planned expansion being prevented, for 41% of the IT&Telecom companies it has led to planned expansion being prevented (which corresponds to 23% if we also include the companies that did not report recruitment difficulties). This is a clear indication of how business-critical skills are for the IT industry.

The fact that IT and telecom companies represent a knowledge-intensive industry is shown by the fact that the companies are looking for university-educated staff to a much greater extent than the national average: 79 percent compared with 31 percent for other industries. Another way in which IT and telecom companies stand out is the high degree of informal channels used in recruitment, cf. the figure below. Informal networks and contacts are the most common method of recruitment in most industries, but while the Swedish Public Employment Service comes second when other industries are looking, it only comes fifth for IT and telecom companies, after social media, spontaneous applications and recruitment and staffing agencies. Advertising comes only in sixth place, which reinforces the picture that it is the informal routes that apply to enter the industry.

One clearly underutilized channel is recruitment abroad, which only 5% of IT and telecom companies use, a surprisingly small difference from the total (4%) given how relatively more internationalized the IT industry is. Another underutilized resource is collaboration with training providers, with only 11% recruiting through them. In a follow-up question about how well the various recruitment channels have worked (cf. the series of images below, Figure 15), cooperation with education providers is the channel that has the largest proportion of respondents who answered "very well".

In the series of figures below, where all the relevant charts linked to IT&Telecom companies can be found, Figure 16 shows another way in which the IT industry stands out, which concerns the soft skills in demand: responsiveness and communication skills come in second and third place, compared to places 6 and 9 for the total.

That digitalization is having a profound effect not only on the IT and telecoms industry, but on business in general, is clear from the report that presents the full picture of the recruitment survey, where digitalization is a recurring theme.