There has been quite a bit of press attention on a study by the ESRI which found the under-45s have been hit much harder by the recession than the over-45s. By all the metrics in the paper, according to the Irish Times report, younger people have fared far worse than older age groups in areas like unemployment, mortgage arrears and negative equity.
The second half of the Irish Times story included reference to a report by the National Economic and Social Council which made for even grimmer reading.
According to the NESC, the report highlighted the regional disparity in youth employment but while choosing to focus on the differences between Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown and Limerick city might seem an interesting approach to take, it did so at the risk of distracting from the greater truth, that youth unemployment is at unacceptable levels.
According to the NESC, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown has the lowest rate of youth unemployment but before anyone gets carried away and starts celebrating it is worth mentioning that this ‘lowest’ rate is 27%. So, even in the best area, youth unemployment is more than a quarter, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 14% or so. The worst hit areas for youth unemployment are Limerick city (50%), Donegal (49%) and Wexford (47%). Those figures are even more frightening when you consider that emigration has probably helped to make them better than they could be.
All of this is occurring at a time when, according to research by Accenture (as reported in the Irish Independent), three-quarters of businesses believe the skills shortage could affect their attempts to grow their business and a third believe they will have to look abroad for recruits or cut investment in Ireland. On a wider scale, the European Commission is predicting as many as 900,000 jobs could be unfilled across the EU in the next two years because of a shortfall of trained digital professionals.
Looked at this from the outside, the answer appears blindingly obvious: train as many unemployed young people as you can to fill as many of those jobs as you can. There are two groups that can do the most to help deliver this solution: government and business. The problem is that the former seems unwilling to govern and take the responsibility for helping young people become skilled and the latter is unwilling to accept any share of the responsibility of helping to train young people to fill the jobs it has. In other words, there is a lack of joined up thinking from government and business. Too often, both parties are looking to the other to do the work.
Amid all the talk of skills shortages, you could be forgiven for thinking that much of IT is fundamentally complex and bewildering to the ordinary person on the street. My guess is that quite a lot of young people are actually pretty tech-savvy, possibly more so than a lot of older people working in the industry. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to believe it would be possible to bring a number of them on board reasonably quickly and give them the skills necessary to fill some of those vacancies.
The cynic in me also believes that, as with many other disruptive industries before it, the IT sector is placing a little too much emphasis on the special skills it requires to function properly. There must be a large chunk of work in the IT world that is, not to put too fine a point on it, as predictable and automated as the processes on an assembly line in a factory. If there isn’t, there certainly should be and likely will be. IT projects may require other skills and use different materials, but the process is still likely to follow a familiar pattern that mixes automated (or fixed) processes and human ones. When you think about it, the same applies for pretty much everything.
So, unless every single IT project is unique to the point of requiring completely different processes every single time, the question we need to ask is just how rarefied are these skills the industry is so short of and why can’t they be taught to the young unemployed people of Ireland? Surely someone in government or business should be able to produce a flow chart of the processes required to fix the problem.
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