Creating paid work through computer-based technologies

After years of caution, investors are now keen to fund the best-prepared new e-business ventures, and traditional companies are now quite rapidly stepping up their response to Internet opportunities and threats. E-commerce by European companies will more than double between 1999-2000 and more than double again in the following year. The innovators are creating new work opportunities but skill shortages are widely reported as a constraint on more rapid growth. The number of unfilled IT jobs in Europe will grow from 500,000 in 1998 to an estimated 1.6 millions by 2002.

In 1997 the number of new jobs in the information society sector increased by nearly 9%, as against under 1% in the case of all the other sectors put together. In 1999 in the European Union one new job in four was in the information society activities, such as computerization, telecoms and the Internet.