At the generally excellent ICT Excellence Awards dinner last week (marred only by the excruciating party political broadcast on behalf of the referendum "yes" camp by Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore), I was interested to hear the views of Dragons’ Den member Sean O’Sullivan who put the case for Ireland to allow immigration for people with relevant IT skills to try and get the country moving again.
He argued that because businesses were finding it difficult to recruit sufficiently skilled people in Ireland to fill particular posts, they should be allowed to bring in people from abroad to do those jobs and let them settle here. The spin-off benefit for Ireland was that as many as six extra jobs would be created locally for every one of the jobs filled by skilled immigrants/settlers.
It struck me that this approach essentially turns the outsourcing argument on its head so that instead of moving jobs to where the people are (which leads to the loss of jobs in Ireland and the economic benefits that flow from them) we bring the people we need to where the jobs are (and retain the economic benefits they bring to the local community).
There’s no doubting the surface attraction of such a scheme but I can’t help thinking that, at heart, it represents an admission of defeat. For several years, Irish politicians claimed this country was in the process of becoming a knowledge economy with a vast pool of young graduates ready and able to help drive the digital future. Then the crash came and revealed, all too clearly, that for all the talk about a knowledge economy, far too much of Ireland’s success was based on property speculation and an unsustainable construction boom.
I can’t help wondering if things might have been better for us all if the politicians had applied a little bit more knowledge to the economy back in 2005 or so. Anyhow, that’s done now and there’s nothing we can do about it. To quote a phrase, we are where we are.
Nevertheless, I do have a feeling of unease about the idea of bringing in people to plug the skills gap. It’s probably because I’m a little bit old fashioned in what I think industries should be doing to ensure they have a steady stream of suitably qualified employees to meet their ongoing requirements. To me, the IT industry is no different to the shipbuilding industry of yesteryear or any other skilled trade, so it surprises me that so few offer "apprenticeships" to help train the staff of tomorrow.
It reflects an endemic short-sightedness, I suppose, on behalf of the IT industry, a sense that it is better and cheaper to buy in or poach skills from somebody or somewhere else than develop them inhouse. So while I can’t fault the logic of what O’Sullivan proposes, I can also see the potential pitfalls. After all, given their track record why would IT businesses in Ireland ever bother trying to develop staff inhouse if they could get someone from abroad to do the job instead? Wouldn’t it end up making the situation worse?
And on the other side, what incentive would there be to keep people that come in to jobs from abroad from staying at a particular employer (and thus generating those extra local jobs) and not being poached away by another company in a different location? In which case, those local jobs would start to look very precarious indeed.
Modern industries are always quick to complain that the present education system isn’t delivering students with the skills they need to fill their jobs but the fact is, since time immemorial, that hasn’t really been education’s responsibility. In most cases in the past, people have learned on the job. All too often, industries like IT seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it by expecting the state to do the training for them so they don’t have to pay for it and then complaining when the things students learn aren’t specific enough.
This may not be surprising given their propensity to poach staff from each other to patch a skills gap, but there’s a poetic irony in the fact an industry built on the back of technology which helped to put paid to the practice of people staying at a single company for their working career and learning more skills as they progressed should suffer the consequences itself.
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