Israel’s place among the world’s technological elite is being jeopardized by an alarming lack of engineers, technicians and even doctors.

And this lack has sent Offer – situated in the high tech hub of Tel Aviv, to look abroad to find workers for his fast-growing Internet data firm SimilarWeb.

“There’s a brutal fight over skilled employees,” said Offer. The company has hired over 200 new people as it has quadrupled in size in the past two years.

The company has set up a development center in Ukraine to boost the technical side of the business that analyzes website data.

Israel’s high tech enterprise seems to have dried out the well without the vast network of foreigners who call Silicon Valley home or the huge populations of emerging markets like India.

According to the country’s chief scientist, Avi Hasson, who is the government’s point man on sustaining innovation, over the next decade Israel will face a shortage of about 10,000 engineers and programmers in a market that currently employs 140,000.

“The issue of skilled and available manpower is the main barrier to growth and competitiveness in the field of high tech,” Hasson said.

The high tech industry became a major growth engine and investment magnet for Israel and it sprouted from an advanced military and flourished with state backing.

Local start-ups have been eagerly snapped up by multinationals like Apple, Intel and Google and have set up research centers. 12.5 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product and half its industrial exports is now composed of high-tech goods and services.

As younger firms compete for workers with the global giants operating in Israel, they are noticing the skills problem.

“There are a lot of international players around, coming in with deep pockets. Facebook, Google and others can make offers 50 percent above market and equity packages that are very lucrative. It’s becoming harder and harder with the amount of effort you need to put in to recruit,” said Nir Zohar, president of website-designer Wix.com. The company is known for its big-budget Super Bowl ads.

The alarm over the threat to Israel’s pool of “human capital” has been sounded by Bank of Israel Governor Karnit Flug ever since taking office in 2013.

The workforce of Israel is being made less effective, says Flug by the aging population, lagging education and poor integration of Israel’s Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish minorities in the labor market.

About 30 percent of the population is composed of Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

While the rate of students completing medical school is among the lowest, nearly half the country’s doctors, for example, are 55 or older — the highest figure in the Western world.

For years the start-ups had been benefiting from tax breaks and government funding while the tech companies prospered for years by tapping into the skills of workers trained in the military or intelligence sectors, both of which are drying up.

To try and compound the problem, the government is now implementing a number of programmers to include ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs who rarely serve in the military and are marginalized from the high tech industry, like improving language skills and special training.

(Adapted from Reuters)