Digital natives not all 'e-skilled'

This week is European e-skills week.  This campaign sets out to raise awareness of the value of e-skills in Europe's employment market.According to figures released by the EU, the ICT sector is directly responsible for 5% of European GDP, employing 5.8 million people.  In the economic downturn people with fewer e-skills have experienced more difficulties in the labour market and this trend is set to continue - it is predicted that by 2015, 90% of all jobs, across all sectors, will require ICT skills.  The campaign also suggests that just because young people are ‘digital natives' this does not necessarily mean they are ‘e-skilled'.The campaign has pulled together the results of a number of research projects and has highlighted some interesting trends and statistics:

• The number of computer science graduates has been declining across most of Europe since 2006.  Only Germany and Poland are bucking this trend.
• Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom and Luxembourg are the most ICT-specialised countries in Europe.
• 58% of employers believed the education sector is not doing enough to prepare young people for the modern workplace
• An average of 13% of young people across Europe are not using the internet regularly - in particular those with a low formal education.
• Only 25% of young people across the EU consider that they have ‘high' levels of basic internet skills (finding information via internet search engines; attaching files to emails; making internet telephone calls, file sharing and web page creation).
• Only 10% of Europeans have created a web page (17 % of the highly educated; 7% of the low educated).