CERT, the State tourism training agency, placed 99 per cent of its graduates in jobs last year, its chairman said yesterday. However, he warned that the catering industry faced stiff competition for school-leavers from other sectors and more work needed to be done to present tourism as a fulfilling and well-rewarded career.
Mr Eamonn McKeon was speaking at the publication of CERT's annual report, which shows that the agency trained 11,042 people for the tourism industry in 1997. Mr McKeon, however, believes that the tourism industry will have to struggle to meet the sector's needs. The continuing boom in tourism is increasing demand for staff, he says.
That pressure is compounded by the competition from other growing sectors such as information technology and teleservices.
Mr McKeon said he was not unduly concerned by the number of non-nationals working in the tourist industry. "It's not as though they are taking jobs that Irish people want. In any case EU citizens have a perfect right to work here and I would point out that a lot of the success the Irish tourist industry has enjoyed can be attributed to the financial transfers which have come our way from other EU countries".
CERT reported that the number of new hotel bedrooms in the Republic grew by 12.4 per cent last year. Just over 50 per cent of CERT's expenditure - or £6.9 million - went on the training of school-leavers. CERT course fees rose by 31.1 per cent in 1997 over the previous year.