This year's CeBIT show in Hanover is hosting an IT Fitness Campus where job candidates can test their computer skills by taking an IT fitness test.

German human resources service provider Randstad is offering more than 1,000 jobs in IT as well as career counselling to visitors.

The IT Fitness Campus is a joint project run by CeBIT organisers Deutsche Messe and Microsoft's IT Fitness Initiative.

The project aims to highlight the importance of IT to students and trainees, and candidates who make the grade have the chance of going home with a concrete job offer.

Randstad will be looking for IT employees with various levels of experience for jobs including mechanical engineering, telecoms, energy engineering, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and aviation.

"CeBIT visitors can stop by for detailed information on their own personal career opportunities in the IT sector as well as the engineering sciences," said Eckard Gatzke, chairman and managing director of Randstad.

The German economy currently has around 43,000 vacant positions for IT specialists, according to the Association for IT, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom).

This figure breaks down to around 18,000 jobs in the IT sector and 25,000 in other branches of the economy.

"The IT Fitness Campus will create an additional weekend highlight at CeBIT, " said Ernst Raue, a board member at Deutsche Messe.

"Our stake in this project is to make an active contribution towards remedying the shortage of specialists and young talent in the IT industry."

Microsoft's IT Fitness Initiative was created by Bill Gates in November 2006 and sets out to make four million people in Germany fit to use PCs and the internet by 2010 through online testing and free training sessions.

The initiative's partners include German federal employment agency Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Cisco Systems, Randstad, Bitkom and German skilled trades association ZDH.