A Dublin-based recruitment company has issued an appeal to more than 100 financial institutions and IT companies to assist it in combating the skills shortage.

Computer People Ireland, the Irish branch of the European IT recruitment and contracting company, is looking for industry partners here to help re-train workers with little or no experience in computer programming. The move is in response to the growing skills shortage in the IT sector, and the proliferation of programmers commanding huge fees on a contract basis. Computer People is hoping a mix of IT graduates with no workplace experience and more mature workers with no IT skills will create stable teams for companies to implement their long-term IT projects.

Computer People will target young people with no previous work experience in the technology industry, women rejoining the workforce after their children have started school and people with good business experience seeking a career change to IT.

According to Ms Grainne Martin, branch manager, Computer People Ireland: "At the moment a lot of IT problems are responded to by knee-jerk reactions, rather than proper resource planning. Multinational companies end up spending huge amounts on manpower, while very little thought goes into planning the workforce for the future."

A similar initiative has already begun in Britain where Computer People has formed a partnership with IBM to recruit 120 trainee COBOL programmers one of the most sought-after programmer skill sets. Once the trainees have been recruited, Computer People's IT training arm, AC Interskill, will bring them up to speed on COBOL programming over a six-week to three-month period. On completion they will be placed with IBM projects around Britain. Computer People has also selected a number of experienced contract staff from around the world to act as mentors to the new programmers and add a balance of experience to the start-up teams.

Ms Martin says it is not difficult to familiarise people with the right aptitude with a wide range of IT skills within a relatively short period. It plans to broaden the British initiative to include a wider range of IT skills, including PL1, Assembler, Visual Basic and MS Access. But Ms Martin concedes the initiative is not suited to object-oriented languages such as C++ which are heavily maths based.