In a boost to tech hopes, the European Commission has announced a digital skills coalition that brings together high-profile companies to help fill around 700,000 unfilled ICT jobs.
Vice President of the EU Commission, Neelie Kroes pointed out on her blog earlier this week that getting the right skills and jobs together to help give Europe a competitive edge was her mission at Davos this year.
According to the EU Commission, the number of digital vacancies across the continent is growing but the number of graduates and other ICT works with the required skills is shrinking.
In order to combat this, the coalition is taking pledges from companies that can offer training, free online university courses and startup cash to get things going. So far Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Nokia, Telefónica, Randstad, SAP, ENI, Telenor Group and ARM have made pledges.
The CIO community, CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies) and Digital Europe are also among those who have made a commitment for action.
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Kroes is clearly delighted with the existing commitments and has taken to Twitter to express this saying that companies at Davos have been approaching her to pledge their support.
Very pleased by launch of #digitalskills initiative. More companies coming up in the corridors 2 pledge support. Keep it coming! #Davos #WEF
— Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) January 25, 2013
With great hopes that the tech sector can help save the European economy, making sure that there are people to actually work in this sector is a fundamental issue and it’s good to see this being addressed at Davos.
Hopefully government support across Europe and issues around cross border visas will also come under scrutiny in order to help startups grow in ways that will eventually bring about economic change.
Image Credit: Georges Gobet / Getty Images
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