The underlying challenges behind the skills shortage.

1. IT professionals trained and certificated in other proprietary skills are uncertain of the benefits of working in the relatively unstructured sector of Open Source environments;
   
2. IT professionals working in the Open Source space have a tendency to be self-taught, learning in the job or through peers; consequently the lack of formal training means that their competences are less visible than in other areas;
   
3. There is a lack of consensus on the skillsets needed by IT professionals working in open source;
   
4. There are a wide range of training and certification options which appear to be competing with each other in a situation where there is no commonly agreed competency framework that is supported by vendor, technical and user communities;
   
5. Outsourcers and other IT vendors generally do not have a validated record of the Open Source competencies among their staff and subcontractors;
   
6. Lack of quality documentation and training materials for emerging business applications means that the resolution of difficulties becomes problematic.