While chips down in many sectors, IT struggles to fill jobs

NET RESULTS:According to leading figures in the industry, there are thousands of vacancies in technology

YES, THERE is high unemployment and our economy is taking a terrible battering (as are many others at the moment; this is not a unique problem). Yes, there is a huge increase in the number of people leaving the State, as opposed to the number coming in. But we have unfilled jobs in one of our most promising and critical sectors, technology.

And whatever the reasons for emigration – which are not as straightforward as political point-scorers would have it – we have a need for immigrants to fill those vacancies, and help create others.

The technology industry has, according to some of its leading figures and industry groups, several thousand of jobs lying open. The sector has also created about 1,250 jobs since the start of the year, according to IDA Ireland. These are “smart economy” jobs, available from the big multinationals, established indigenous technology companies and hot new tech start-ups.

Not all are pure technology jobs, either. Many do not need degrees in computer science or maths. They are jobs for people with multiple languages, with business skills, with management or sales qualifications or, you name it.

Others need IT graduates with specific skillsets or experience. And they are sitting open.

For some reason, this serious issue is ignored – I suspect because the public has wanted to hear about new job creation schemes from a new Government, new initiatives and new vision. But to my mind, new vision means looking at the underlying reasons why jobs are not being taken up by the existing population, many of them graduates obviously qualified to do so, and why companies also cannot easily get the employees they need from outside. And we, as a nation, need to become a lot more mature about how we view emigration. Perhaps we need to get rid of the word entirely. If we go by the example set in the last recession, people did not emigrate so much as leave to go work elsewhere and then eventually return.

Graduates in exactly the areas in which jobs lie open are leaving, indicating that, for many, going abroad to work is something they want to do. Perhaps many feel such a leave-taking is easier on family if you simply say there aren’t any jobs in Ireland. However, it also indicates the education system may not be producing graduates of the calibre or skillsets that companies here need. Google, for one, has said so.

This is a serious education issue requiring deep examination.

Be that as it may, much of our net immigration in the last 15 years was driven by returning Irish emigrants. They came back with the experience and fresh skills that fuelled the greatest boom Ireland has ever seen.

So I, for one, think that having graduates head abroad for work will be a net gain for the State in the future and for graduates themselves, who can grow and expand careerwise in ways they never could by going straight to work at home.

The Government is long overdue for a serious talk with industry about immigration.

If even in an economic crisis with rising unemployment, masses of technology industry jobs lie unfilled, companies need to be able to bring in skilled jobseekers from elsewhere. Right now, the visa system is so onerous that, on average, employers say it takes two to three months to bring a single employee in. That time gap leaves indigenous companies struggling, and may mean that significant projects at multinationals – with associated expansion and job creation – go elsewhere.

“We need to look at the whole visa system for what I would call catalysts in an organisation,” says Dermot O’Connell, general manager at Dell Ireland. A catalyst is a person critical to enabling a new project, or a new research and development area, to gel.

O’Connell points out that a whole team of additional jobs will assemble around that individual, from executives to other parts of an implementation team, with the promise of many future jobs.

If visas take three months, “that’s when specific projects within a multinational will go to another country”. Bye bye jobs.

We also need an “entrepreneur visa”. These are under advanced consideration in Britain and the US.

Entrepreneurs with good ideas create jobs in the countries in which they are located. We should make it easy for them to be located here.

Repeat studies show how important immigrants are to any vibrant economy, especially in the technology sector. One showed that well over a third of Silicon Valley companies have had either a Chinese or Indian founding member.

Another indicates that immigrants take a lion’s share of patents in the US.

And just this week, a story in the San Jose Mercury News noted that the majority of America’s top science competitors in high school are the children of immigrants, often those working in the tech sector. Some two-thirds of the finalists in Intel’s Science Talent Search competition in the US this year had that status, for example.

We have seen a growing, similar pattern in our own BT Young Scientist competition – it is these “new Irish” who often have a particular passion for science and maths.

We have a strong, cutting edge, broadly-based technology sector in Ireland. We need to be sure Irish jobseekers have the skills, abilities and experience for those jobs – and enable those from outside, who can fill those jobs and create others, to live, work and grow their own families here.