In Israel, when Alexey Chalimov established software development company Eastern Peak 4 years back, he was aware he might not find the coders and developers that he needed at home.
He traveled to Ukraine and employed 120 individuals to design web platforms and mobile applications for smaller Israeli startups and global clients.
“I operated for few years in the Israeli market and I was aware what the prices were here and I knew there was a scarcity of employees,” he told the media.
Boosted by business enterprises, the technology industry in Israel is the firmest developing part of the budget. It contributes for 50% of exports and 14% of economic outcome.
But scarcity of employees indicates that its position at the cutting edge of international tech is at jeopardy, with penalties for the employment and economy.
The Innovation Authority of the government predicts a scarcity of almost 10,000 programmers and engineers over the upcoming years in a market that services almost 140,000 individuals. Israel has plunged 6 spots down to 17th position in 3 years in the ranking of World Economic Forum due to the difficulty in finding skilled technology workers.
The scarcity is specifically painful for 5,000 startups in Israel, which strive for talent with development centers of tech majors such as Intel, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They provide huge incentives that a startup cannot pay for.
Israel will miss its edge if the scarcity is not undertaken, claimed the Head of Policy at the Innovation Authority at the societal challenges division, Noa Acker.
“Wages will be extremely high and the sector will contract down merely to very high level R&D while much of the task will be distributed,” she added.
The chief reason for the scarcity is a severe drop in the number of math, computer science, and statistics students, to a low of 1,600 in 2008 down from a peak of 3,000 in 2005.
This is partially due to issues in primary and secondary schools where shortage of capital means advanced math teachers are in short supply and some classrooms do not have computers.
###
