There is no IT skills shortage, just look at the salaries on offer and the selectivity of employers in filling posts. All leads to a belief that they can pick and choose, if that is the case, then there cannot be an IT skills shortage.

During the mid 80's to90's they said they same think in the US. companies like intel imported workers from India. THe ironic thing is now those same workers from indian had there jobs out sourced to their local country men

The blue card sounds a lot closer to the US H1 immigrant worker visa than the permanent residency permit that is usually called a green card.

What I really want to know, though, is whether the physical form of the blue card will match its name.

(icon chosen solely for its colour)

Is of course it's not green - either in the environmental sense or the colour. It's a sort of nasty beige colour.

And while it's true name is an Alien Registration Card - confusingly, on the immigration website, it was often referred to as a form.

So while I'm cool with having an official, government sanctioned piece of ID that says I'm an Alien (and a registered alien at that) - I wonder what the purpose really is to having one, besides setting up black markets for fake IDs and very nice ID producing contracts for friends and family).

This is an idiotic idea. Basically, the model is unsustainable, and the governments are trying to keep the average age of the workforce low. But you can't do that! Even if we let in a whole lot of young migrant workers in 2020 (who then support the existing retired population), we will have a repeat of the problem in 2050 when those migrants have retired.

The solution to an aging population is *not* to have rapid population growth, but to raise the retirement age.

Having read the article on El Reg and the Beeb and thinking there might be an IT skills shortage, I decided to look on Jobserve to find out if the rates in IT had increased since I left for NZ 2 years ago. Not a hope!

Another non-story...

Western Europe is the most crowded place on earth; even China looks spaced out by comparison. Why do we reinforce a socio-economic model that is obviously failing? We want fewer people, not more. If mankind cannot figure out a way to deal with reduced population growth we are doomed.

The current system requires that a company has to prove (via a huge big expensive interview campaign) that you are the only person who can do the job and that no one in the EU can. Also if you leave said job, you have to leave the EU or get another company to go through the hassle mentioned above in order to get you a new visa.

The new system will still have the first requirement. The second requirement is taken care of by the fact that you have to stay employed by the company for 2 years under the proposed scheme. SO where's the change? You still need a job offer, you still need for a company to prove that your the only one that can do the job. And you still cant leave the company and change jobs without requiring a whole new visa.

Only difference i can see is that instead of the prospective employer paying for the visa its now up to the prospective employee. Which will just lead to hassles galore! The only usable visa system for skilled workers in the EU is the UK HSMP visa and even thats right pain in the ass to get processed (£400 per application whether you get accepted or rejected! Absolute bollocks!)...

It used to be called an "Alien Registration Receipt Card" and in the very old days it was green(ish) and cardboard. Its an immigrant visa. It entitles you to reside permanently in the US and work (as it says) but its very easy to lose these days -- leave the country for more than 6 months without advance permission or suffer anything but the most trivial brush with the law and you're gone.

The so-called blue card is just the Euro answer to an H1-B with the difference that you don't have to renew it when you move employers.

Now, about this skills shortage. To look at the help wanted ads you'd never guess that this was the case. There are jobs going begging but there's a tendency these days to draw the requirements so tightly that it is unlikely that anyone will qualify. What, typically, employers want around here is enormous amounts of skill and experience -- very narrowly focussed -- plus a willingness to work 70 hour weeks. (Shortage of personnel, you see....). Once things get moving then you're out the door as your job goes overseas. Makes you wonder why anyone bothers.

My arse. If there's such a shortage why did my last job go to India?

I am afriad the widespread influx of IT staff into the UK has not helped UK business, workers from the Indian subcontinent do not have the same overheads of a native UK national

There would be plenty of UK IT staff, but many big companies have chosen to make them redundant and replace with cheaper 3rd world staff

I am all for competition, but competition on a level playing field

There is no shortage of IT staff in the UK which normal supply and demand was sorting out pretty well before the widespread input of 3rd world staff, the input of such staff has just driven the pay levels down

Really all this social manipulation is going too far, and usually for the benefit of inefficient big businesses

Raising the retirement age is one thing as well as not letting people retire at 50 (as in France).

The biggest problem is with the Pension schemes in France and Germany for example. When paying state pension contributions, you are not paying for yourself, but for the people current retired. With the demographic situation now, there are less and less people paying in and more and more taking out. In both countries the contributions are no longer covering the costs, so they have to take money for other tax sources to cover the costs. The situation can only get worse.

The solution is that the state pensions should be smaller and there should be a personal schema for each person to top up the state pension (as in Switzerland). The difficulty lies with the transition from the old scheme to the new and no politician will take the risk. They just hope it doesn't collapse when they are in power, but these schemes will collapse.

<rant>

Skill shortage in the UK ...hmm you mean skill shortage in the south of england caused by insanely high housing prices and rents !. Everyone not earning 250K in the city ( you know the peons like nurses, engineers,etc) find they work 70 hour weeks .. but still are up to their eyeballs in debt just trying to live honestly. Cue the single EU or illegal migrant worker who accepts insane hours, live 5 to a room and are paid below what a normal citizen requires to live, avoid all tax but still consume tax paid services like the NHS. Should we remind the muppets who put forwards this idea about the hundreds of thousands to illegal migrants, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of former eastern block migrants flooding to the UK?

All you need to do is look at the jobs on offer in glasgow in IT, employers want highly experienced staff but don't want to pay the market rate.

Some good ones are, they want a multiskilled web developer but only want to pay 7.20 an hour, support people but require only knowledge of windows server 2003. My favorite was a junior software tester ... requiring 4 years software test experience but paying £15k per year ... needless to say that advert has been floating around for the last 6 months!

</rant>

We have enough Hi tech people here, but they leave for the USA. To keep them here we need decent wages for their profession. If you import a bunch of Indian and Chinese workers, you'll drive down the wages of Hi tech professionals and increase their incentive to leave. Plus who will go into University to study IT if the money is lousy at the end?

Isn't that where the new Hi tech workers are supposed to come from? European expert Universities?

If they want to do something, clamp down on the 'access to the profession' tricks that EU countries use to block foreign freelancers. Fix the car registration, tax registration, pensions problems. None of these directives in their current form work correctly, they are defeated by deliberate bureaucratic obstruction.

I estimate whenever I change EU countries, the legal fees to get (really extract by force) the permits, tax registrations, my wife's permit, car transfers etc. is about 2000 Euros, and in some cases (Belgium in 2005) I never managed to get my Tax ID, I was refused permission to be a freelance IT worker.

I have found, whils looking for Jobs, that there is loads of work, but no one is willing to do any training. I have gone for loads of jobs, which I have the qualifications for, but not the exact skills they want. They come back saying "you are not qualified for the job". Odd that. What happend to companys wanting to train people? Very odd thing. I went for one job the same as my current one, but with better prospects within the company, and I have an interview...

Perhaps there wouldent be this problem if companys would spend a little money on training there staff (Both in there job, and to move up in the company), rather than getting in people who have the skills and letting them stagnate.

>>There is no shortage of IT staff in the UK which normal supply and demand was sorting out pretty well before the widespread input of 3rd world staff, the input of such staff has just driven the pay levels down

Oh please! The IT market is booming and demand is higher than ever leading to a skills shortage. A rant about "widespread input of 3rd world staff" is pretty contradictory to the whole point of this story. If you're smart enough, there's enough jobs around to cater for you "1st world" types. Ridiculous!

>I have found, whils looking for Jobs, that there is loads of work, but no one is willing to do any training. I have gone for loads of jobs, which I have the qualifications for, but not the exact skills they want. They come back saying "you are not qualified for the job". <

I have observed exactly the same thing and i think it comes down to a complete unwillingness for modern managment to invest in training beyond the micky mouse "soft skills" crap that has no real value. Having worked for a multinational for the last six years in a post that requires significant technical knowledge, often in cutting edge fields , all the training on offer has been "basic excel, basic outlook,basic word" etc. or even more pointless "health and safety" ( ooooh the most dangerous thing we have is paper cuts), "Ethics" was giggle as we did this one just after the Enron scandle, " massive fraud is ok, but misusing the photocopier -- hang the bugger!" ( i kid you not it had a section on misuse of printers and photocopiers). Advanced HTML/XML/Scripting training ... sorry no corparate need for that.

The other problem is the muppets in the job agencies utterly failing to understand anything about technical jobs , the number of times i have to explain that no, chemical process engineering is not the same as business process enginnering, or that software testing is not the same as testing turbo compressors !