ICT skills shortage

Uncategorized

28 November 2012

Ireland is suffering from an IT skills shortage. You don’t need me to tell you that. Everybody else is saying it, so it must be true. And it is a problem given the amount of employment ICT provides to the country.

A recent document from the Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, entitled "A review of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) skills demand in Ireland", estimated the industry employed 74,000 people directly and another 200,000 indirectly.

But the report stated there was "a startling number of opportunities available in the sector at present" with 75% of ICT companies looking for workers for an estimated 4,500 vacancies. And while the emergence of next generation internet, mobile ICT, location based services and the growth of social networking presented "an impressive opportunity" they also represented a challenge. "The Irish workforce needs the key ICT skills that are demanded by existing and future ICT companies," the report stated.

Easier said than done, of course, given the fast changing nature of the IT world and the rapidity with which skills become outdated. It probably doesn’t help in Ireland’s case that the nature of the country’s attraction for ICT companies, from outside the state at least, is probably more to do with finances than personnel. If that wasn’t the case, I suspect Ireland wouldn’t be so reluctant to change its very generous corporation tax rate.

By enticing companies to do business here, the strategy pursued by the government and its agencies is to generate employment opportunities for its citizens. As a strategy, it’s fair enough but one of the difficulties it brings is in how a country the size of Ireland can deliver enough people qualified to meet the demands of those businesses, especially when you remember that the indigenous industry requires a certain number of suitably qualified employees to meet its own requirements.

As a result, you often hear managers of IT businesses in Ireland bemoaning a state of affairs where they have to go abroad to recruit candidates to fill their vacancies. In many cases, the talk shifts to speeding up the visa process to bring people in more quickly from countries outside the EU.

There’s no doubt that the presence of multinational operations in Ireland can be a boon to the Irish economy but with a finite pool of ICT workers, they can also be something of a curse, especially when they can offer better salaries and perks than local businesses. 

The report from the Joint Committee makes a number of very pertinent recommendations, such as making programming and/or computer science as much a part of the curriculum as French or German and giving students the option of taking computer programming as an exam subject.

Perhaps of most interest to people in the industry is the suggestion that opportunities available within the sector need to be communicated effectively to schools, students, teachers and parents. "This career awareness must have an input from industry as this will best communicate the constantly evolving technology sector," it adds.  

Graduate conversion courses are commended as "an excellent opportunity to fill some of the ICT vacancies in the short term" although the committee stresses there needs to be "a strong emphasis on continuous monitoring of the quality of these courses and the skills capacity of the graduates".
 
One of the most significant issues is the drop-out rate for ICT courses, which is much higher than the average dropout rates for all disciplines. This means that even when the state succeeds in convincing students to sign up for ICT courses, it struggles to retain them. According to the report, as many as 350 students of ICT/Engineering courses "do not progress from [the] first to second year of their course every year".
 
Possibly this is down to the quality of the courses but you can’t help feeling that it’s a terrible waste of time and money when 350 students drop out every year, especially as those places could have been taken by somebody else.
 
The report says there is a need to improve ICT-literacy among teachers and also highlights the difficulties Higher Educational Institutions are having coping with the numbers of students opting for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses.
 
All of which is very worthy but I can’t help wondering if we’re in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation where the success of Ireland’s strategy of attracting multinational companies to the country is also causing the shortage of suitably qualified ICT workers. If there were less of them, Ireland would probably have a better chance of filling the vacancies in its indigenous IT industry. There wouldn’t be as many ICT jobs, of course.
 
The government is in a difficult situation trying to balance the requirement for more ICT courses at a time of austerity when it is cutting services and raising taxes to suck an average of €3.5 billion a year out of the economy. It doesn’t help that the unemployment rate is hovering around the 14% mark and lots of young people are leaving for foreign climes to seek work elsewhere.
 
It might help if the multinationals coughed up a bit more tax to help the country pay to retrain the unemployed to plug the gaps they have today and to educate its citizens to be their workers of the future. The report doesn’t mention this at all but it seems only fair that if organisations seek to have more involvement in how the nation’s youth are educated and the construction of their courses, they should pay for the privilege.

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