However, Australian Computer Society president, Philip Argy, said the situation looked grim.

"The education system is not keeping pace with where the world is going, and it's that gap that is responsible for what we are seeing. And it's worse because the growth in the need for IT skills has levelled out, and even started to increase, but the lead time before people see that, start enrolling in courses and graduate, is five to seven years," he said.

"In the interim, it's easy to see what is going to happen. There will be massive skills shortages and there will be a massive pressure on the government to boost immigration to lift these skills sets, but then it deprives local graduates of even more jobs."

There's something intuitively odd about our natural history of being an innovative populous along with the fact that we have slump in IT enrolments, Argy said. He feels it may be largely because parents and career advisers haven't let go of the dotcom bust idea of IT.

"That is blinkered view, without the understanding that IT can be in your toaster, your washing machine, your car, a boat, a plane or a submarine. It pervades marketing. All marketing people can talk about these days is their CRM systems or their data mining systems, so IT training equips you to be a better marketing person, IT training equips you to be a better car mechanic, to build a better toaster. People really need to realize how pervasive IT is and not to think of it in narrow terms any more," he said.