This project analyzes if and to what extent employee training efforts, the lack of qualified personnel, firm size and employees skill structure influence firms decision to outsource information technology services. The alternative to outsourcing usually is to train already employed personnel and/or to hire workers with the desired technical skills. From interviews with decision makers from the industry and from existing theoretical work in the related literature, we derive hypotheses that we empirically test. The econometric analysis concentrates on firms that produce business-related services. We analyze the sectors Architecture and technical planning, Machine and car rental, Management consulting and Advertising. The data source is the Survey in the Business-Related Service Sector.A main result of the analysis is that employee training efforts, the lack of qualified personnel, firm size and employees skill structure only have a very small effect on firms outsourcing propensity. It rather seems to be the case that the outsourcing decision depends upon factors that cannot be observed in data (for example managements approach towards ICT).