14,000 Vacancies in IT...?

Dub13

I was listening to George Hook today and he had a chap on from DCU,he reckoned that there were up to 14,000 jobs going in IT at the moment in this country.A lot of people were texting/phoning into the show disagreeing and basically saying what jobs were there were in fact low pay and entry level.

I am not in IT so I don't know if this is true,I would be interested to know what you guys think...?

donaghs

I've been working in IT since 2000, so I'd be very sceptical. Certainly the job situation has improved since 2001, but not the amount of jobs that there were in 2000. Look at the jobs pages in the Irish Times or the Indo, you rarely see a big glossy ad for IT jobs. Sometimes its often only a tiny column for IT listings. Yet there's plenty of jobs advertised in Financial, Healthcare, Education and other sectors.

Recruitment companies are always talking up how many jobs they have on offer, and the quality of jobs. Similarly, a university professor (whether teaching Computer Science or Medieval Welsh) is always keen to get more students into his courses as he gets more funding and prestige from this. Admittedly the job prospects will be better doing Computer Science than an unusual Arts degree.

mick.fr

There are IT jobs in this country for sure, but I do not know where this 14.000 blank positions are coming from.
That would make our life much easier if it was. Maybe an Indian figure ?

Anyway, companies who are looking for IT guys, are mainly looking for skills and experience.
Any IT job advertised is asking for lots of skills usually, even if the recruiter knows they can not find somebody with all those skills combined, this is a fact that for sure they do not take young bloods, even with an engineer diploma.

Young blood in this country are usually starting in Help Desk positions at 25k.
When they are lucky they can also start in a consulting company such as Accenture, KPMG, E&Y who use to recruit lots of young blood. So this is a goods start for them. But there is no way a first blood engineer will get a first job as system admin, consultant or so and expect for a 50k salary the first year.
Of course, there is exceptions :-)

Anyway of course we still encourage people to pass a diploma, master whatever in IT, because even if they struggle a little bit to find a first job, after some time they will be in the top list once they got the experience. Plus many companies have salary range based on Diploma+Experience.

the_syco

mick.fr wrote:

There are IT jobs in this country for sure, but I do not know where this 14.000 blank positions are coming from.

There was a study done about the amount of IT jobs out there. Pulled from a number of different sources. Now, as you know, the jobs are usually listed in 3 different sites, so thats 14000 divided by 3 and you get 4666.

And then you must understand that half of them so-called "IT jobs" are jobs that involve a PC, such as receptionists, jobs that have IT stuck to them to encourage people that it isn't a crap dead end job, etc.

Now, at any given time, there's usally lots of jobs asking for realistic:rolleyes: stuff, such as... 5+ years experience in Vista (yes, I know its just out, but I saw this cráp with XP, when it first came out), etc.

Then there's the phone support jobs, some are good, some are soul destroying.

Tom Dunne

donaghs wrote:

Look at the jobs pages in the Irish Times or the Indo, you rarely see a big glossy ad for IT jobs. Sometimes its often only a tiny column for IT listings.

I don't think IT jobs are generally advertised in the print media any more - it's all done online. This may give an illusion that there are not too many jobs around (I switched jobs last Summer and was scouring the papers for jobs).

Having said that, didn't this person from DCU release a pretty similar report this time last year? With fairly similar figures? A cynic might suggest as a computing lecturer he is trying to talk up the opportunities to get more students into his university around CAO application time.

DonkeyStyle \o/

tom dunne wrote:

Having said that, didn't this person from DCU release a pretty similar report this time last year? With fairly similar figures?

Not sure if it was the same guy, but yeah... same shít, same time; different year.

Mmm, standing on a factory production line... a hot IT job indeed!
Presumably there was some HR misunderstanding about the kind of "assembly" computing students were learning. :rolleyes:

rooker7

I'd suggest that figure is inflated to be honest. Though I believe for more specialised positions Irish companies may be struggling to find the skills from native people. I was recruited from the UK to come and work in Ireland.

experiMental

maybe most of these jobs are help desk/IT assistance/network/sys-admin related?

There are so many non-IT companies out there that require personnel with IT qualifications. For example, certain architectural/construction firms have a network of computers and they need those people to configure them, because the main construction-related workers just don't have the time to learn the ins and outs of server architecture, etc.

If you'll factor in cases like this, maybe the number of IT positions will amount to 14000?

donaghs

Only large companies and entities tend to have a decent sized IT departments. The number of such companies in Ireland hasn't increased significantly since the guy from DCU made similar statements and CAO-filling time last year.