The shortage of skilled professionals is becoming ever more apparent.

Germany’s economy is experiencing unmistakable above-average growth once again and it is now that companies are beginning to reap the rewards of holding on to their skilled employees. However, the shortage of skilled professionals is becoming ever more apparent, particularly in the IT industry, and is also the subject of increasingly fiery political debate as the article at heise.de reveals.

In order to combat the shortage of skills a trustee group set up by Hamburg based companies on the initiative of Steria Mummert Consulting has decided to invest €1.3 million in a new masters degree on „IT-Management und Consulting“  in the Computer Science Faculty at the University of Hamburg.

The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit has launched a new series on demographics with this article by Kostas Petropulos. The author boldly risks a global look at demographic trends and the international migration of skilled workers. His article comes to some quite astounding conclusions. A new colonialism is emerging which is robbing poorer countries not of their raw materials but of their human capital. He proposes a global demographic partnership in which Germany, as an export nation, ought to have a particular interest.

At the same time, there are also alternative domestic solutions to the problems associated with population aging. Markus Fasse reports in the Handelsblatt on a new trend in pre-retirement work in the greying automotive industry. Two pilot projects with teams consisting primarily of older employees at BMW and Audi have revealed that these teams are able to increase productivity rates.

Boosting productivity with existing workforces and using personnel development resources to meet demand for skilled workers appears to be growing in importance all the time. Talent management, focused successor management and, of course, competence management for highly specialised professionals are also becoming increasingly important in law firms, as Myrto Elisabeth Leiss describes in this article for the Handelsblatt. decídalo Skills Management can help these law firms whenever they need “to generate precise requirements profiles which are ideally based on a competency model”.

Our IT skills study has picked out the right trends on the IT job market. Now the American publication Computerwelt has carried out a survey to identify the 11 most important IT skills for 2011. This survey, too, emphasises the special importance of skills at the interface between IT and business.

We can therefore only advise IT specialists to continue taking a broad approach, to keep an eye on both business and the market, to master the requirements for the future and to go for the jobs which are in tune with cutting edge developments.

The fact that there are some jobs in the highly professional and technological IT world which are not quite so avidly sought after as others is illustrated nicely by this amusing article in Computerwelt.

The report by Dan King in particular on his time as a “Mud system architect” in a sewage treatment plant is well worth a read and ought to encourage IT personnel to keep working on their continuing professional development.