Career Zoo goes wild!

It’s been a couple of weeks since the third and most successful Career Zoo, the job fair for professionals. It was amazing! Firstly, the standard of the companies who participated rose considerably, check them here. A full range of industries were represented – healthcare, IT, telecoms, pharmaceutical, finance, manufacturing, management consultancy and retail. And there was an excellent choice of education establishments.

A big draw was the skills conversion courses offering new career opportunities for professionals. In just 6-12 months these courses allow individuals to retrain, free of charge, into a growth sector like software development, cloud computing or pharmaceuticals. I think these courses would offer a fantastic opportunity for those who are coming from the toughest industries like construction, architecture and engineering. Interestingly, we just did our own survey on skills conversion in the IT sector, which produced very good news for jobseekers (IT Skills Conversion Survey Results)

With such a stellar line up it was no surprise that the attendees went through the roof. It’s estimated over 10,000 people turned up over the two days. To be honest it felt like all 10,000 were there on the Saturday. There was a queue from the Mansion House all the way down Dawson Street late into the afternoon! I felt bad for the people who had to queue, but for health and safety reasons the staff at the Mansion House needed to manage the numbers. I hope that everyone got some value at the event after patiently waiting. Our stand was completely packed with a wide range of professional s offering their CVs and asking for advice. It fact it took a week just to get through the hundreds of CVs we received and contact the applicants.

The Career Clinic we hosted on behalf of Career Zoo was again a huge success and the walk-in slots were snapped up within the first hour on both days. I personally dealt with five, very talented individuals who welcomed the advice on their CVs, interview preparation and career strategy. However, I was surprised at how some of the attendees prepared for Career Zoo. It’s not very often you get a chance to have a face-to-face conversation with a potential employer before application. It’s a fabulous opportunity for people to make an impression and let all the great employers attending know that they should seriously consider them for a job. Nonetheless, it was only a minority who dressed formally. In fact there was one gentlemen with “Who’s your daddy” emblazoned across a t-shirt. You could argue it’s perfectly fine in the IT sector to dress casually to meet potential employers who might want to interview you, but I personally would have erred on the cautionary side and dressed conservatively.

In addition, it was quite common to meet people who did not bring CVs or who had ran out of copies. It seemed strange to me, that people would be content to queue for 20 minutes to get into the event, but not have carried out prior preparation. There can’t be too many events that gather companies of that calibre into one room wanting to hire people. I received CVs with addresses scribbled out on them, some missing numbers and one even missing a name! You can be sure, that the attendees who did their homework beforehand – researched the companies attending and the jobs available, produced well prepared and tailored CVs, dressed for a proper interview, tried to make an impression on the employers attending – would have been the first to get a call, or might even have secured an interview on the spot.

Overall, I think most people - exhibitors and attendees- got some real value out of the event and I believe there have already been hires. Credit to the organisers who have been able to build a bigger and better event than they had previously. Here’s looking forward to the next Career Zoo!

Stephen is responsible for the marketing and communications for Hays Ireland including the website, PR and social media. He is a member of the Marketing Institute of Ireland and is passionate about the development of marketing through new technologies.

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IT skills in demand in Ireland

The last 6 months has seen a large number of announcements from the IDA in relation to the creation of new jobs in the Information Technology sector. Some of these come from established companies including IBM, SAP, Google, telfonica o2, Citrix, Servicesource, AOL and Hewlett Packard whilst others come from newcomers to Ireland including Riot Games, MFG.com, Electronic Arts, Webroot and Lumension.

In 2010 we have seen a significant increase in demand for IT contractors, mainly from IT Consultancy based companies who are now getting the opportunity to bid for contracts in the Public Service and Financial Services sectors – a major shift from 12 months ago. Permanent recruitment has also started to pick up over the last 3 months with demand increasing in niche sectors.

As ever it is always hard to find good people and skills in demand include: Contractors with Java, C# and .net development. On the infrastructure side VMWare, Unix and SAN Specialists are all highly sought after. The permanent recruitment market has different dynamics and whilst Java is still in demand, so is C#. The permanent market sees industry experience just as important as skills and any one with Financial Services backgrounds, particularly in insurance and life and pensions, will find options in the market.

Salary levels and Contractor rates are still in line with 12 months ago, but if demand continues to increase, it is likely that we will see some pressure on these over the next 6 months.

In summary, the market looks optimistically healthy and the important investment from international organisations continues. But we should take this with a note of caution, there are warnings that if Ireland is not able to produce the calibre of candidates these type of organisations demand they could take their investment elsewhere.

If you are an established professional in the IT industry or a graduate looking for your first role you could do worse than becoming proficient in some of the above skills.