As Ireland makes a strong recovery from recession can we expect the ICT skills gap to widen in the coming years?
But what skills do we need? Are they the same as a few years ago? That’s a long time in tech.
The skills required by ICT professionals now go far beyond the narrow confines of technical ICT expertise. In the digital economy, a wide range of staff are now expected to have additional skillsets, such as business, analytical and data protection skills.
Ireland once again needs to assess the likely future demand for ICT skills. Growth in areas such as data protection, digital marketing and productivity skills such as presentation and spreadsheets, as well as next generation security are sure to increase skills demand.
“The difference with these new technologies is that they are SMAC (social, mobile, analytics & cloud) enabled where previously we relied on client/server approaches so it is important we adapt our future skills strategy to enable Irish organisations and Irish based multinationals to take advantage of these technologies”, said Mary Cleary, Deputy CEO of ICS.
“Digital transformation is key to future success. Technology adoption must be about transforming the business and not about the technology itself. We need to place even more emphasis on developing people that understand how to straddle between business and technology.”, continued Cleary.
In the short-term, we believe the solution is in helping employers and employees to re-train or re-skill in priority areas.
We need to improve the flexibility and productivity of the education and training system, with shorter courses such as ICDL – the Digital Skills Standard, to respond to new skills demands and to help increase graduate output.
Traditional ICT education and training policies needs resetting by helping those in non-ICT careers to re-skill through ICDL. There is no sector where your knowledge is more quickly out of date than ICT.
SureSkills and the Irish Computer Society have joined as national partner for ICDL Workforce. For more information about ICDL , click below or email icdl@sureskills.com or call (01) 240 22 77.
