“So the idea is that basically anybody of any skill level can use it so from that point of view, it’s useful to have all kinds of people working with us to keep that aspect of things fresh.”
Polyglots
A major factor in Tableau locating in Dublin was the easy availability of people with multilingual skills.
“We have a team member here that is fully fluent in five languages, and I mean fluent and being able to hire people with a variety of language skills is big positive,” said Hillery.
He also thinks that his company’s location has made a big difference to its hiring history – it is located in Ballsbridge in Dublin, and as a result is surrounded by other tech companies and can offer a good work life balance for people living in the area.
We see the marketplace in a state of constant flux between the skills needed for business transformation and the supply of people who have them. We work hard to help our university partners and customers to stay ahead of the skills curve, James Flynn, IBM
“Having the tech cluster in this area is a big positive and around half of our staff cycles to work. They live in the surrounding areas, or a little further off in Rathmines, Ringsend and so on. So location is definitely a big selling point for us.”
“At the same time, you can’t discount corporate culture. Dublin is a small town and word goes around about places that are good to work in and places that are not so good. Our company culture is great, and as a result over half of our hires are employee referrals.”
“It’s not complicated, once money is out of the way, where would you rather work? Somewhere that’s uplifting or somewhere that’s depressing.”
Academic partnership
One of the strategies larger companies such as IBM employ in order to stay on top of the skills issue are academic partnership initiatives in which they collaborate with universities in order to mutually develop and maintain the skills needed to get the most out of IT products and services.
“As technology changes the curriculum for both companies and colleges has to be continually transformed. For example, a company that invested in business analysts five years ago would be unprepared for the big data analytics world of today, while cognitive computing as an academic programme is completely new,” said James Flynn, university programme manager for IBM Ireland.
“We see the marketplace in a state of constant flux between the skills needed for business transformation and the supply of people who have them. We work hard to help our university partners and customers to stay ahead of the skills curve.”
“Yet that’s become far more involved than simply hiring the ‘right people’, you need a coherent strategy that integrates the skills environment, the business needs and the changing technologies.”
Skills audit
A recent audit of more than 60 companies in Ireland by the Fast track to IT (FIT) organisation found that there were more than 7,000 jobs empty in the IT sector and that demand for skilled ICT professionals in all areas is growing.
The audit showed that big data analysis had the highest demand for skills at expert level, whereas areas such as networking and PC maintenance, contact centre support and platform administration had a higher requirement for candidates with competent and entry level skills.
Many of these IT roles and in-demand skillsets lend themselves to vocational forms of study, such as those supported by IBM and others such as SAP.
“Overall we’ve had good success in attracting and retaining qualified staff and this is in great part due the investment we’ve made in our university programme in Ireland,” said Cormac Watters, managing director of SAP for the UK and Ireland.
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