According to CSB data, 99.6% of Latvian enterprises with 10 or more employees were using the Internet at the beginning of 2018, up one percentage point from the same period a year ago. Meanwhile, 44.1% of employees in these enterprises used computers with Internet connections on a regular basis, up 1.9% year-on-year.
At the beginning of this year, 15.5% of the companies included in the survey employed ICT personnel.
Representatives of the statistical bureau noted that the share of enterprises employing ICT personnel depends on the size of the enterprise. Most often, ICT specialists are employed in large enterprises (79.5%). Medium-sized and small enterprises employ ICT specialists less often – 34.7% and 10.2%, respectively. Compared to 2017, the indicator in the group of large enterprises has gone up by 7.8% points, while in medium-sized and small enterprises by 4.9% and 1.3% points, respectively.
Last year, 5.2% of enterprises recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists, while more than half of them (56.5%) had vacancies for ICT specialists that were difficult to fill. Out of the total number of enterprises, 5.4% provided training to their employees to improve their ICT skills.
In 2017, enterprises outsourced most of the ICT services. The outsourced ICT services mostly included development of business management software/systems (34.3%), support for business management software/ systems (32.3 percent), as well as development of web solutions (40.4%), which is 17.5%, 17.3% and 23.6% more, compared to the functions performed by own employees, respectively.
Large enterprises also more often use own employees for such ICT functions as maintenance of ICT infrastructure, support for office software, support for business management software/ systems, support for web solutions, as well as ICT security and data protection, the survey revealed.
