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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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.