HAYS IRELAND BLOG

THOUGHTS ON THE WORLD OF WORK

Tuesday 8 February 2011

The challenge of retraining Ireland

A couple of weeks ago I spent a weekend at the Career Zoo event at the Mansion House in Dublin, giving career advice to a broad range of qualified people as part of the Career Clinic which was ran by Hays. We were absolutely inundated with requests for appointments from graduates, people currently in work and those who had lost their jobs due to the economic down turn.

The event was a real eye opener for me, as I normally only deal with the corporate market - which is pretty robust. It made me realise that there are a lot of people out there who are desperate to work, but have been failed by institutions like FAS who aren’t offering adequate career advice. For example, a PHD graduate I met was told to go and do a bookkeeping course!

In many cases these qualified individuals just didn’t know where to start. The first question that most of them asked me was– “Where are the jobs at the moment?”

The answer is that we are seeing skills shortages in IT, financial services and jobs within the multinational companies that require a second language – in particular, French, German, Dutch or any of the Nordic languages.

The next question a lot of people asked was how they can get into these sectors, when all of their experience is in Engineering, Architecture, Law or Construction? Or how do they get a career leaving college now? Most of them are very despondent as they see the transition into a new profession too big a hurdle.

Engineers, Solicitors and Architects are certainly intelligent people, with transferable skills and if they can’t find work in Ireland they will leave the country. So what’s the solution? I believe the next government needs to invest in these professionals and provide training for the sectors where the future looks bright. I don’t know how we can implement it, that’s a job for our leaders. But I do know it needs done and urgently.

For the graduates, there is a genuine shortage of jobs resulting in a surplus of educated people on the market. Most organisations didn’t run a graduate scheme in 2009 or they took graduates in reduced volumes to previous years. So they need to make themselves more employable - look at the sectors where there are skills shortages and study a related degree or masters. There needs to be a real push on learning a second European language. In fact it should be given the prominence in schools that Irish is given as it will significantly increase long term job opportunities and make Ireland an even smarter economy. Third level students who study courses with an internship should try and do this in a foreign speaking environment and apply their language as soon as they leave college.

We currently have a high unemployment rate of 13.6%, however we also have skills shortages in a lot of areas. We need to be able to retrain our experienced, highly skilled people so that they can thrive in Ireland as opposed to overseas and we need to create a mechanism to make this happen. Finally, we need to review the career advice for secondary and tertiary level students so they are better equipped to find work in the next decade.

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