Initiative seeks to plug tech skills gap

IRELAND COULD boost employment right across the economy by attracting up to 75,000 highly skilled overseas workers a year to cope with the skills shortage in the technology sector.

This is the message of Open Ireland, a new initiative led by entrepreneur Sean O’Sullivan of MapInfo and Dragons’ Den fame. While World Intellectual Property Day is being marked in Ireland today, O’Sullivan said that solving the skills shortage problem was a much bigger issue.

By bringing in the “best and brightest” from overseas, he said it could help create employment throughout the economy.

“For every one job that a Google creates as a technology company, it creates up to five or six jobs in the local economy for the butcher, baker or retailer etc,” he said, adding that demand for technology skills is such that companies have to outsource the work outside of Ireland.

“There is no way a country as small as Ireland can produce all the software talent it needs,” said O’Sullivan, adding that the growth of start-ups is being hindered because the shortage of tech talent is so severe it is difficult to get developers to join start-ups at competitive wages. “As a result, there are more entrepreneurs than there are developers.”

He has felt the impact in his own business, Avego, which provides software solutions for improving transport efficiency. “Revenues could be higher if we were able to employ enough developers. Our company is being held back because our software development is being slowed down.”

If nothing is done to improve the situation, Ireland could shortly become an economy where you have to pay above the market rate for average or below-average talent, said O’Sullivan.

“Once that happens, you can bet that major employers in the country will take notice.”

While IT skills shortage is a worldwide problem – US start-up incubator Blueseed recently said it wanted to dock a ship hosting foreign tech workers outside San Francisco to get around US immigration laws – O’Sullivan said if Ireland moves quickly, it can have “first mover advantage on this”.

Mr O’Sullivan is the keynote speaker at an event hosted by William Fry solicitors today to mark World Intellectual Property Day.