The Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) is supporting a new European standard for ICT professionals would it says could help solve the lack of e-skills across Europe. The European e-Competence Framework (e-CF), which describes the competences and skills requirements of ICT professionals, has become a European standard, following its official publication by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) this week. It offers organisations, businesses and ICT practitioners in Europe a common language to describe digital competences and proficiency levels.
CEPIS Secretary General, Fiona Fanning, said: “Organisations must be able to understand the core areas of ICT expertise required by different roles, in order to recruit and develop suitable employees, and maintain adequate levels of competences. The e-CF is the ideal tool to support organisations in doing so. It will help tackle Europe’s alarming ICT skills gap. Previously, there was no way to express ICT competences and skills requirements and gaps on a European level.”
The e-CF was designed to provide clear definitions to support decision-making with regard to the selection and recruitment of candidates as well as the training and assessment of ICT professionals. Employers can adopt it to establish profiles and career development paths for ICT professionals. The definition of career streams will offer valuable insight into potential career opportunities. A large company could, for example, use the e-CF to develop a tool to manage the process of training identification. The e-CF would serve as a consistent benchmark of competences to assess training programmes addressing individual development needs.
The e-CF was developed under the umbrella of the CEN Workshop on ICT Skills, through a process of collaboration between experts and stakeholders from across Europe. The national standards bodies of the 33 CEN-CENELEC members will now begin implementing it at national level.
The Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) is a non-profit organisation seeking to improve and promote a high standard among ICT professionals, in recognition of the impact that ICT has on employment, business and society. CEPIS currently represents 33 member societies in 32 countries across greater Europe. Through its members, which are the professional ICT bodies at national level, CEPIS represents 450,000 ICT professionals.
IT Europa view:
If standards could help markets, this would be bigger news. Measuring IT competency is notoriously hard and not necessarily what either IT companies or customers want. One to watch but not necessarily significant, given the real gap and major shortfall in IT skills. Now, if there was more support for industry promotion, skills training and removing national politics from the issue.....