2 DIGITALIRELAND INSIGHT Thursday 10 February 2011


Tech Jobs Potential Contents


2 Tech jobs as a ticket to the future Good IT professionals are the bedrock of the burgeoning tech industry and it’s vital to raise awareness on how important these qualifications are


4 The skills to succeed A career in technology is only as good as the rate at which professionals reskill themselves. What are the most in- demand skills in today’s IT world?


6 IT jobs salaries With the IT industry’s boom, many workers in the industry are not experiencing wage freezes or pay cuts


8 The big tech job announcements We take a look at some of the top job announcements that will create careers for years to come


12 Tech education


Which colleges offer the best qualifications to help IT graduates break into the industry?


14 Jobs in the industries of the future


Many of the roles in demand today didn’t even exist six years ago. What technologies will be leading the way to job creation in the future?


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Why Ireland needs to get switched on to tech careers


It is a tale of two countries. One is steeped in recession where bright young graduates believe emigration is their only option. The other has a technology industry that is the envy of the modern world and where skilled graduates are in short supply. Will the two become one, asks John Kennedy


Google’s EMEA operations headquarters in Dublin Editor: Laura O’Brien Email: lobrien@siliconrepublic.com


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Intel, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Apple and HP have located substantial operations here. Over the course of recent months


I


Google announced 200 jobs here (and 1,000 across Europe), Intel has an- nounced 1,000 new jobs here and over the past year HP, which already employs 4,000 people in Ireland, announced close to 1,000 new jobs between Dublin, Kildare and Galway. Facebook, for exam- ple, has grown to 200 people in Dublin and plans to hire another 100. The technology industry is acceler-


ating ahead, fuelled by the universal growth of broadband, new innovations like the iPad from Apple, the rise of so- cial networking services like Facebook, clamouring demand for smartphone de- vices and, of course, apps. We have truly only scratched the sur-


face of where technology is going and for the foreseeable future graduates of tech- nology courses with the right skills and experience can plot a career that would provide them with gainful employment and a ticket to the world.


RELAND is a relatively young country with a compact popu- lation, yet has attracted more foreign direct investment (FDI) than Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. Tech giants like


‘I think Ireland has talked a lot about positioning itself as a knowledge economy, but we’re not seeing the


number of graduates we really need to see emerge from colleges’


An economic impact study prepared


for Microsoft by Goodbody Economic Consultants has revealed that Ireland has many of the attributes to become a global cloud computing centre of excel- lence and could capture a disproportion- ately large share of the cloud computing industry estimated to be worth €40bn worldwide by 2014. Ireland alone has a chance to build


a €9.5bn a year in revenue industry by 2014, resulting in 8,600 new jobs. Not only that, but because cloud com-


puting lowers costs to businesses, by mi- grating the to the cloud some 2,000 new non-IT small and medium-sized firms can be created, which would in turn em- ploy 11,000 people. If Ireland is to reap the benefits of the


stellar growth of this sector a number of things need to happen: n There needs to be greater awareness at a political level of infrastructure defi- cits in the areas like science, broad- band and computers in schools.


n Irish kids need to perform better at maths.


n We need more kids who can write software code and who will be the talented developers of tomorrow.


There is a clear link between maths and science performance in Irish schools and the fact that computer courses still


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