Shortage of skilled graduates blamed as 936 tech vacancies are left unfilled

Nearly a thousand tech jobs are available in some of the world’s top companies, but Ireland does not produce enough skilled graduates to fill them.

A survey of the available tech jobs found there are 936 jobs available in the tech sector, from sales to high-end developer positions paying close to €60,000 annually.

The jobs are available in Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo, as well as other tech big hitters that have chosen to make Dublin a base for their operations.

The CEO of the Irish Internet Association, Jane Mulvihill, said the problem was that the firms are unable to find employees to meet their needs.

“We need to take a more granular approach to the tech sector vacancies, because perhaps we, the companies, have a lot of vacancies as we don’t have the right people to fill the positions,” said Ms Mulvihill.

“There are a lot of people out there with some development experience but not nearly enough to get the job.”

A lot of the jobs that are on offer also require language skills and the companies who are offering the jobs have a preference for native speakers.

For instance, Facebook in Dublin is looking for user analysts with Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese. These are jobs that Irish people will struggle to fill.

Ms Mulvihill said the IAI has been making progress working with the higher education authority to try and fill some of the skills gaps.

Ms Mulvihill said one of the strange legacies of the boom was that a huge amount of college graduates chose to do specialised degrees instead of a broad degree before entering into a speciality.

“There is a general trend now towards getting people to do more general degrees and then to specialise later on,” she said. “The person with the greatest flexibility has the most gain,” she said.