During these summer months, have you been keeping up to date with the latest developments in the Irish jobs market? Do you know, in particular, what happened in August?
July was an excellent month for jobs in Ireland, with more than 2,000 new roles created across the island. Most interestingly, the majority of these roles were created in Ulster.
July followed June, which also saw an incredible win for the jobs market, with a total of 3,410 jobs announced across Ireland. The figure was greatly helped by blockbuster announcements such as the 1,000 new roles from Amazon Web Services and the 605 positions created by financial services firm FinTrU in Northern Ireland.
It’s a hard act for any month to follow; those massive ‘breaking news’ stories can seldom be predicted. So, how do we think that August fared?
In Ireland and the UK, August is known as ‘silly season’ because its news cycle tends to be peppered with bizarre, ‘fluffy’ pieces. This is because neither the courts nor parliament are in session. The judges and politicians that would often be the bread and butter of journalists in current affairs tend to go off on holidays or just take a break.
As we’re often quick to point out in the Careers section, it’s important that people from all professions take breaks from their work. Apart from the personal imperative, everyone is much more productive and focused if they are allowed a rest. So really, we can’t begrudge people from taking some well-earned time off during August. It does mean, however, that the month was disappointing from a jobs perspective.
There was a grand total of 400 jobs revealed over the month of August, spread over a mere two announcements. Evidently, a lot of people are on holidays.
On 13 August, telecoms giant Eir revealed that it will take on 50 new apprentices for a two-year on-the-job training programme. The location of these apprenticeships was unspecified, but presumably the company will be accepting applications all around the country.
For a long time after that, things were quiet. It really did look like we would have to report a mere 50 new jobs throughout the entire month of August.
Then, software-as-a-service company Qualtrics swooped in with 350 new positions to be created in Dublin as it gleefully announced plans to expand its European HQ. Leaders from the firm lauded the Dublin-based team for being instrumental in enabling Qualtrics’ incredible growth over the last year.
For more on any of these jobs announcements (all two of them), check out the links above.
