ICT jobs market goes on the offensive

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27 February 2012

Microsoft’s announcement of its Career Reboot event on 3 March, where 1,000 job vacancies will be showcased by its industry partners, tells us a lot about the shape of the jobs market in Ireland in 2012. At the same time as unemployment dithers around 14% there exists a massive skills deficit in the one area public and private sectors agree will pull the country out of recession: the ICT sector. Gone are the days of posting ads and expecting the right people to apply. The right people have either up and left or value job security to the point of constructing fortifications around their desks. Recruiters are fighting a lack of skills and awareness of potential candidates as to what retraining options are open to them.

Career Reboot has the feel of a wartime recruitment drive complete with a backdrop of international crisis, only not so much ‘for God and country’ as ‘for economy and Europe’. Microsoft’s contribution isn’t the only example of a foreign direct investment company promoting itself to a growing pool of graduates, professionals and those considering retraining. Between the Government’s ambitious ICT action plan and action plan for jobs; retraining initiative Bluebrick; (controversial) intern scheme Jobbridge; state agencies like the IDA and Enterprise Ireland; and industry partnerships with institutes of technology there are opportunities should the out-of-work seek them out.
One example of how academic institutions are benefiting from corporate input is this week’s announcement by IT Sligo that it has joined the Citrix Academy Network – the first third level institution in Ireland to do so.

Catering for an initial class of 25 students, graduates will receive accreditation in virtualisation and cloud technology and undergo a work placement with one of the company’s channel partners.

IT Blanchardstown has been offering conversion courses in association with Cisco for some time, and has seen great success retraining individuals without a background in technology. A 10-month part-time course, the FETAC level 6 certificate in Cisco-CCNA (certified network associate, routing and switching), provides graduates with a practical, industry-recognised qualification and a direct route to industry for network administrators.

As a branded course, the CCNA curriculum for the UK and Ireland is developed in Cisco’s office in Birmingham, and this allows a degree of mobility for graduates.

Tom Nolan, ICT learning network manager for IT Blanchardstown, said the course attracts students from diverse backgrounds, including people up to and including people in their 50s with no IT experience. "We’ll help student out with the basics but after that there is a fairly steep learning curve," he said. "Students that will work will get on fine. We had a student who arrived as a painter/decorator and now he’s moving on to get his degree."

Nolan said the Government has "put its money where its mouth is" through programmes like Springboard (which has supplied 80 students to IT Blanchardstown’s CCNA, CCNA Security, CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ courses) and the new ICT Skills Initiative.

Industry partnerships look set to become the norm in Its now with Athlone, Cork, Dundalk and Limerick all benefiting from support from the private sector in their conversion courses, as do Dublin Business School and Griffith College, to name but a few. The range of courses offered also varies from virtualisation to cloud computing to software-as-a-service – the building blocks of the Knowledge Economy.

Career Reboot will make for an interesting show, but it’s by no means the only one in town.

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