Sixth year students should consider ICT courses for further education

The deadline for students who wish to change their CAO choices is on July 1st. Fine Gael Senator and author of the report  ‘A review of the ICT skills demand in Ireland’ Deirdre Clune is appealing for young people to consider selecting ICT related courses in order to gain valuable skills and be employable once they students graduate. Today the Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation met with representatives from Fastrack to IT to discuss the demands of the sector. Fastrack to IT or FIT is an industry-led initiative that develops and promotes technology-based programmes and career development opportunities for job seekers.

An interesting survey has recently been carried out by   Fastrack to IT (FIT)   which included input from 38 major technology companies.

“The study estimated there are 4,500 job vacancies in the ICT sector and unsurprisingly; it also highlighted the major skills shortage in the area.

Unfortunately, as I have also found through my own research, the report states these positions are not being filled due to massive shortage of suitably skilled applicants.

The companies surveyed believe that many of these vacancies are at the intermediate skills level and people could be upskilled through programmes that would only take between 6 to 24 months to complete.

The Action Plan for Jobs 2013 has targeted this issue, for example the Conversion Programmes and Springboard ICT courses have been extremely successful in upskilling and retraining people with talents in these areas.

Earlier this year it was announced that 2,000 additional ICT graduates will be provided in 2013. These graduates will be generated by harnessing home grown talent and by attracting highly valuable workers into the country through a technology visa system which I have long campaigned for.

The government has the collective primary goal of providing Ireland with the highest proportion of ICT graduates as a share of third level graduates by 2018.

These initiatives are all part of my own and the government’s efforts to transform Ireland into the Silicon Valley of Europe.