FIT (Fastrack to IT) has placed five graduates a week from its courses in new employment since the beginning of 2011, according to Peter Davitt, CEO of the organisation.
A severe skills shortage now exists in the Irish labour market leaving many employers in the technology sector unable to fill job vacancies. This was the message delivered by Peter Davitt, CEO of FIT (Fastrack to IT) today.
“The message is clear – there are jobs in Ireland in specific emerging areas but you need to have the relevant skills in order to be able to compete for these jobs,” said Davitt. “Growth continues within certain areas of the technology sector while the role of technology as an enabler in other growth sectors such as renewable energy means that the right IT skills are in scarce supply in a number of different industries. Our industry colleagues have helped to identify areas of future growth and we have tailored our courses to these areas. As a result we are having a small but very real impact on the unemployment crisis in the country today.”
Emerging areas identified include: cloud computing, software testing, computer systems engineering, games development and mobile technologies.
“In a country that presently has over 430,000 people unemployed, it is a big concern that we are still very challenged to fill job vacancies in critical sectors like Information Technology and specifically in new emerging technologies,” said Fiona Mullan, international staffing director at Microsoft and chairperson of FIT. “Ireland’s whole approach to education and training needs to be overhauled so it better reflects the needs of new sectors and opportunities that are emerging in Ireland and globally. Ireland will continue to have high levels of unemployment unless both the state and industry coordinates its efforts better to produce workers with the requisite skills for successful careers in a modern, innovation economy.”
To date FIT has successfully retrained over 13,000 unemployed people in Ireland over the past eleven years. FIT works in partnership with industry, government, education and training providers mainly FAS and the VECs.
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