TECHNOLOGY: Around half of Cyprus firms found difficulty in hiring ICT experts

Nearly half of Cyprus businesses (49%) found it hard to recruit ICT specialists for jobs requiring digital skills, according to Eurostat.

During 2017, 9% of EU enterprises recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists and 5% reported having hard-to-fill vacancies for jobs requiring relevant ICT skills.

In other words, over half (53%) of all European enterprises that recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists had difficulties in filling these vacancies. In Cyprus 23% of enterprises employed ICT specialist while 9% tried to recruit them.

In the EU, the highest proportions of businesses finding it difficult to recruit ICT specialists were in Czechia (79%) and Austria (78%). In contrast, the proportion was below 40% in Poland (37%), Portugal (35 %) and Spain (25%).

During 2017, 10% of EU enterprises provided professional training to their ICT specialists, and twice as many (20%) provided ICT training for their other staff. In Cyprus this figures was 12% and 24% respectively.

Among the economic sectors, the proportions were highest in the information and communication sector, where more enterprises provided training for ICT specialists (53%) than for other personnel (47%).

Some 44% of large EU enterprises recruited or tried to recruit personnel for jobs requiring specialist ICT skills, that is more than 5 times the proportion reported by small and medium sized enterprises (8 %).

Both groups of enterprises reported hard-to-fill vacancies of at least half the proportions for recruiting ICT specialists (27 % for large enterprises, 4 % for SMEs).