 01-07 November 2000 |
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Front Page Article Workforce taking up IT opportunities
It is admittedly difficult to gauge the number of vacancies in IT, although trends appear to indicate that opportunities in this mushrooming sector are being taken up, a spokesman for the Employment and Training Corporation’s Labour Market Research section said. It is widely recognised that Malta mirrors much of Europe in that it possesses a high number of unfilled vacancies in the IT sector, but, as the President of the Federation of Industry, Joe Zammit Tabona, pointed out at the last Business Times Corinthia Business Breakfast seminar, it is not easy to estimate the local situation since statistics of vacancies in IT are not available. Edwin Camilleri explained that since statistics relating to vacancies are compiled by economic sectors, it is difficult to gauge the overall situation in the "vast" IT field. "Information regarding occupations of IT-related people exists within our database and is closely monitored," he said. "But all IT-related people (defined as workers falling within occupations like computer programmers, designers and analysts; computer technicians and electronics or telecommunications technicians) are spread among all economic sectors, both manufacturing and especially service-related industries." Mr Camilleri told The Business Times that the ETC has taken steps to tackle the problem of unfilled vacancies in the sector, by joining forces with MITTS and other training providers to organise courses that would promote system adminstrators and programmers. "To date, 88 people have already graduated from the NT Computer Course and 23 from the NCC Diploma course," he said. He also pointed out that the high number of participants on IT-related courses, within Fellenberg and other IT-related institutes and ETC training programmes, indicates that people taking jobs in the field is on the increase. "Considering the level of participation on these courses and even with other training providers, interest in this field is being stimulated and the workforce is reacting," he said. "We have had excellent participation and results on our courses, which have all been full, so the trend looks promising." - | |||||||
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