Ireland’s current government is set to announce its final jobs plan, targeting 50,000 jobs in the private sector, according to reports.
Later today (18 January), Taoiseach Enda Kenny will help launch the 2016 Action Plan for Jobs, which RTE reports will include a 50,000 target for job creation throughout the year.
Loading almost all of this on the private sector, two of the keys are apparently intellectual property development and the supply of skilled employees for the IT sector – the latter of which should surprise nobody.
IT jobs in Ireland paying well in 2016
The IT sector’s pay scale is likely to rise yet again in 2016 if Morgan McKinley’s salary report is anything to go by.
Actually anywhere in STEM should see pay rises abound, with science, engineering, technology and maths all suffering from an underpopulated labour pool.
The incredibly high rate of college dropouts in key disciplines makes for a worrying time in a country so reliant on industries tailored to such specific skillsets.
The number of college dropouts is most prevalent in the field of computer science, where across colleges, institutes of technology and universities combined, one-third of these students fail to make the grade and pass into the second year of their studies.
Acute areas of talent void
According to Morgan McKinley, the talent demand will be most felt in IT, finance, risk, life sciences, pharma and engineering, with pay rises around the 10pc mark for many roles, rising to 20pc in areas with acute shortages within these fields.
The report also says C#, Java and Python were the most in-demand programming languages in 2015, with cybersecurity specialists and mobile developers in for a 2016 full of job offers, it seems.
Meanwhile, a separate report by recruiter Abrivio notes QA testers, Java, .Net, UI, Ruby, PHP and C++ as areas in demand this year, with employee bases expected to expand.
The first Action Plan for Jobs aimed at employment growth of 100,000 by 2016. RTE reported that the Government said that figure was beaten last year, and employment is 135,000 higher than when the first programme was launched.
Last week, €40m was set aside for a competitive jobs fund to help local authorities encourage job creation in tailored areas.
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Enda Kenny image via World Economic Forum/CC BY-SA 2.0/Wikimedia Commons
