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ICT is evolving rapidly and so are the occupations and professional profiles in this field. Where there were a handful of distinct occupations, mainly relating to hardware development, operation and programming in the sixties, there are today several hundreds. In terms of professional titles there are even thousands, because they have evolved at country and company levels, whereby literally each company has developed its own proprietary terminology.

The avalanche of fancy job titles has become counterproductive because it makes the whole ICT landscape intransparent, difficult to compare between companies and countries and hampers mobility of ICT professionals. Large companies with several IT departments in different countries face problems of interoperability.

In some countries initiatives had been undertaken to develop national classifications. Also international institutions like Eurostat, ISO and ILO work on a general classification for the purpose of statistical comparability across nations.

In the UK a system called SFIA had been developed by industry; CIGREF, an association of HR managers of large French companies have their system, and in Germany for example social partners have developed a system for further training and certification of ICT professionals named AITTS.

It is against this background that a European initiative had been launched under the auspices of CEN/ISSS, the European standardisation body for information society systems, to create a kind of meta-framework that serves as reference for the diverse classifications and occupations.

As a first step a European ICT Skills Meta Framework had been produced and adopted in 2005, which described the existing systems, yet did not allow direct comparisons between different occupational classifications.

A group of experts from different institutions, including social partners and HR managers from large companies such as Airbus, Deutsche Telekom and others have now almost finished the next step, which is a European E-Competence Framework. This framework facilitates links between national structures and describes core competences which are universally applicable.

The system was introduced to the plenary meeting of the CEN/ISSS e-skills workshop on 14 May in Paris. If all goes to plan the workshop members will vote on this proposal by end of September 2008 and make it a European industry standard.

What adds additional value to the proposed European e-competence framework is that it associates core competences with ICT work processes and allows for reference linkage to the European Qualification Framework (EQF).

Under the CEN/ISSS e-skills workshop additional projects have been launched in order to support career planning and development for ICT professionals and help employers to find the right people for the right job.

One project aims at making the various existing e-skills career tools interoperable, which is particularly important in the light of the forthcoming European “e-skills and career portal”. The other project aims at making more transparent the huge market of ICT certifications, be they vendor or non-vendor specifc. Today there is an estimated over 600 different certifications available, with varying degrees of quality and value for ICT professionals. A jungle as the project leader called it. Raising quality levels and providing better guidance to ICT professionals will be the key challenge for this project.

The UNI Europa ICTS Taskforce Skills, a group of experts drawn from UNI Europa affiliates, meeting on 10 June in Brussels, will review these CEN/ISSS projects and also consider positive contributions and closer cooperation. All these projects, which are run as kind of “multistakeholder partnerships”, can help to improve the career opportunities of ICT professionals and the additional knowledge available will help them to strengthen their position in the labour market.