To succeed in a full-employment economy, companies need to have a vision which is "intrinsically exciting" and a philosophy which promotes talent irrespective of age and experience, a conference in Dublin has heard.

In a talk entitled "Motivating People in the 21st Century", Mr Michael Buckley, managing director of AIB in Poland, said many managers felt threatened by the rate at which a full-employment economy threatened to suck the key talent out of companies.

"The balance of power has completely shifted. You are no longer deciding whether you want to offer young people a job; they are deciding whether they want to work for you," he said.

Mr Buckley said the changes in Poland, where a competitive market economy was being introduced, was a compressed version of the same changes the Republic had been and was still going through.

He said that although unemployment was running at 13 per cent in Poland, talented people could make a lot of money quickly and weren't going to hang around in jobs where they could not see a future.

The Republic is facing a new generation of competitive pressures as the world gets smaller, he said. He pointed out that global competitors were increasingly reaching into small markets and taking a substantial market share and contracts from local players. Mr Buckley said young people were motivated more by growth, development, learning, and an ambitious, exciting environment than they were by money.