A rant about skills (the lack of them)


You keep making that point. There's no way "re-skilling", i.e. a few evening courses, will solve out skills shortages.
 
To bring it back to the original point

- rang two plumbers recently - neither called back (also emailed both)

- Rang a painter - he said he'd call never did.
 
That wasn't the original point; the original point was that in a counrty with hundreds of thousands unemployed we still have major skills shortages.
 
It would be a start.

There seems to be no attempt by govt to push people to upskill.

The tax relief on part time courses has even been cut.

Many colleges have gove over academic & should be focused on up-skilling.

Yet we have a government saying that they are trying to get people off welfare??

Talking to people on welfare - they would prefer to do something positive - but no options to upskill seem available.
 
thats very true, even the FAS training courses have be cut right back now.....no wonder so many are leaving the country.
 
What we got yesterday in the jobs iniatative was guff.

We should be using the internet, TV, Radio, Community Schools, Libaries, NAMA hotels, NAMA buildings to re-skill.

What we got was another PR stunt.
 
cork said:
Talking to people on welfare - they would prefer to do something positive - but no options to upskill seem available.
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I don't believe that is true, there are plenty of options available to retrain, and the last thing people should be doing is looking to government to do the training. People need to be more inventive and stop looking for other people to do for them what they should be doing for themselves. Here's an example, I recently met an acquaintance from years ago. He was laid off from his job as a civil engineer in early 2009. With his redundancy money he bought a digital camera, and while looking for work, took evening and online courses in photography. He eventually got an engineering job as a contractor which provided a little bit of income and allowed him to build up second hand photography equipment. He now works as a self employed photographer.
As Purple points out, there are many skills that are in shortage despite the number of unemployed, including certain manual skills as well as certain engineering areas and IT. The amount of courses, in IT alone, that can be done online part time or full time, is huge. Any tradesman who has been pretty much out of work since the start of the crisis would at this stage almost have a degree in IT and a complete new career ahead.
If you are an unemployed carpenter or structural engineer for example, then you should not be looking to up-skill to become a better carpenter or engineer, you should be looking for different fields altogether.
 
And there are so many that are free. A computer and an internet connection is all you really need. In my own field, the skills are pretty scarce and have been for some time. There is no barrier to entry (although experience is required at the higher level). For junior roles, I would imagine a personal dedication to studying material and messing around with online software/demos would impress most employers.
 
I work in IT and recently had to interview for a couple of open positions.

Around the same time, a pretty well known company in Dublin were laying off staff (due to their bosses financial irregularities in the US).

I interviewed 3 people from there and I was amazed how they were ever hired. Their skills were so pigeon-holed from working in that company that they were unhireable.

It would have taken 6 months to get them productive for me. ( eg, I know how to make a cup of tea, but of these 3, one would know how to put water in the kettle and switch it on, one could pour boiling water on the teabag, and one could add milk and sugar). When I asked them about the tasks they did not do, it was 'another teams responsibility' and they were dissuaded from doing it! Their experience is going to severly restrict their chances of being rehired quickly or at the salary they expect.

I ended up hiring an English guy who was well experienced in all aspects of the job and could be productive in a week.

I've experienced various Indian contract houses where initiative seems to be a dirty word.

Also, location seems to be an issue in the sticks. People want 40-50k for a job worth 25-30k but ignore the much lower cost of living outside Dublin.

Others, understandably enough have houses bought while working in Dublin and cannot move.

The incentives for FDI into Ireland was solely concentrated on Dublin and to a lesser extent, Cork. Galway, Sligo, Athlone & Limerick were ignored and the result is these towns and their satellites are without any decent industry..but now I'm OT.
 

There's been massive and targeted FDI into Galway (for example). That's why Galway is such a big medical device manufacturing hub. Cork has pharmaceuticals etc. Dublin gets the lions share but mainly in Financial services and IT. The problem now is that the jobs go where the skills are and we're short on skills.
 
Purple said:
The problem now is that the jobs go where the skills are and we're short on skills.
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We continue to have major jobs announcements in IT yet we have a massive skills gap.

I don't believe that the 400,000 people who are unemployed do not have skills. In the construction sector there are many people with very technical skills that they should be able to transfer to the IT sector. I think that the IT sector has an image problem. Some people would prefer to wait it for a recovery in the sector that they want to work in rather than transfer to IT. Skills in IT can be gained online, through internships, self taught and self promoted.

The easy answer would be that they government are not targeting the inwards investment strategy to match the available skills. But do we believe that there are inward investments available that match the available skills? Many less skilled jobs in Ireland are a result of governments huge successes in pharma, IT and international financial services.
 

Many of the skills we have are not needed and will never be needed again, at the existing scale of supply.
 

I can relate to this; I find this more and more in large mutinationals that small/medium enterprises. It is as if the employees have initiative blinkers on;
I do my bit and thats all and with any correspondance they CC the world and their mother as they are petrified of going outside their remit. It is shocking how some big businesses actual manage to operate with corporate stagnation.
 
The Paypal jobs announcement was perfect example of the mismatch of available skills and jobs announced. This anouncement was simply viewed as 1,000+ people off the dole queue. How many people on the dole have excellent written and spoken Turkish and 3 years experience in fraud prevention??

Most of the Paypal jobs will require importing the skills or taking them from other MNCs who will then import the replacements.

I am not saying that these jobs are a bad thing as there are plenty of positive knock on effects that are positive.
 
Purple said:
Many of the skills we have are not needed and will never be needed again, at the existing scale of supply.
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A perfect one line summary, but unfortunately you still regularly hear people from the various construction organisations about stimulating the sector back to its glory days.


I was thinking exactly the same thing. This is the case with lots of IT jobs in recent times. Not only is there a lack of IT graduates, but there is a lack of IT gradates that learned something meaningful and up-to-date. IT is such a fast moving industry, but colleges do not seem to be keeping up with it, at least that is the impression I have had in recent years with graduates that I have encountered.
 
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