Opening doors

FROM recognisable names such as Amazon, EMC and Novartis to small but expanding Irish companies, job seekers had plenty of people to meet at specialist recruitment fairs in the past fortnight.

The last of three events was held in Cork, where students and graduates of the Government-funded Springboard courses mixed with those who have availed of back-to-education payments from the Department of Social Protection.

The idea was to try and match up companies with vacancies and job seekers with hopes of work.

While some visitors had mixed views on the purpose of such initiatives, particularly the availability of fully paid jobs rather than internships, the networking was positive.

David Olden from Inniscarra, around five miles west of the city, is 49 had worked with Apple for around 12 years, mostly in management roles.

“I took redundancy in a restructuring at Apple in 2007, and I already have qualifications in electronics and IT. I decided cloud computing was the up and coming thing so decided to go back to college full-time, after spending four years upskilling already,” he said.

He is most of the way through the postgraduate course in cloud computing at Cork Institute of Technology which began in March.

Announced by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn in February, the second year of Springboard courses organised by the Higher Education Authority is designed to get people with previous employment a chance to be job-ready for new and growing sectors. These include information and communications technology (ICT), green technology, medical devices, financial services, international sales, food and drink and pharmachemicals.

Already, more than 8,00 people have applied for this year’s Springboard programme and 4,700 have been accepted onto courses.

Many of the 2,500 graduates to date from Springboard’s first year of operation have already got work. But there are varying opinions at the event at Cork City Hall on whether employers’ needs are being met.

David said he is one of many on his course — including barristers, teachers, architects and engineers — with an awful lot of experience and a lot of qualifications.

“Sometimes that intimidates companies, they don’t want to hire someone as an engineer because they have worked in management, and there’s nothing much available in management positions so you fall between stools,” he said.

So with many people coming from programmes like Springboard with a lot of experience, a quality companies should be valuing, are employers instead opting for the cheaper labour of recent graduates and interns?

Ken O’Shea is research and development manager at EirGen Pharma, a Waterford company represented at the Cork recruitment fair which makes pharmaceutical products for global markets.

“We’re recruiting chemist roles. There have been quite a few people to see us here, a lot of IT people and lot of recent graduates, and a lot of people interested in internships and Job Bridge,” he said.

Mr O’Shea says the company has not previously had physical space to accommodate interns but hopes that planning permission it has applied for to expand its facilities might allow them to be taken on from next year or 2014. Asked about the role of interns and whether they are just a chance to get work done cheaply, he says that it depends on the company.

“You’ve got some unscrupulous employers who might see it as a way to get cheap labour. But every year we take at least one person on placement from Waterford Institute of Technology and last week we rehired someone who did a placement with us 18 months ago,” he said. “It’s essentially a chance for us to get a sense of the person and whether they are the right fit for the job. It’s been very useful.”

Another job seeker who is currently back in full-time education but did not want to be named thought there was a lot of positivity, as none of the companies was talking about a recession. But she was still a bit cautious.

“A lot of them are looking for interns and you don’t know then if there’s a job there at the end of it,” she said.

Paudie O’Callaghan from Fairhill in Cork City had worked in electronics manufacturing for 20 years. He got into a Springboard course in good manufacturing practice and technology at CIT within two months of finishing up his last job in July 2011.

Although the course is continuing, he has been looking for work at the same time, and believes there are more chances in the medical devices sector than in pharmaceuticals.

“What’s coming against me is not having experience of medical or food sectors in my background, even though we’re covering all manufacturing practices. They [employers] are looking for experience, I’ve got interviews as well, first and second interviews and even did the medical for one job.

“But I think it’s more experience they’re looking for, rather than education,” says Paudie.

ONE employer that did not necessarily require past work in the same industry was Oxford International, a global recruitment firm whose only European base is in Cork and employs more than 50.

“We’re looking for recruiters and account managers, we hired eight people recently and we have six to eight jobs at the moment. We look for good communicators and telesales experience is an advantage, all our work is done over the phone,” said internal staff recruiter Linda O’Leary.

She said having a degree is good but not essential and, despite some recent concerns from employers about a shortage of people with fluency in foreign languages, it is not a major requirement for applicants because most of their client companies use English.

But what advice does a recruitment manager have for those at events like this one, where people often vent frustration that their CVs and applications often get no response.

“It’s such a hard market, there are so few jobs and so many people looking for them. The thing is to know the company very well, have it very well researched before even talking to somebody on the phone or going to meet someone for an interview,” Linda suggests.

Mairin McCabe, who has returned to education after spending most of the last decade bringing up her children, is hopeful that there will be work opportunities when she completes the same cloud computing course as David Olden in December.

“This is my first event like this, it’s hard to know whether the jobs are there. I’m not sure if we’ve got the skills some of them want,” she says.

“We’re hopeful of either getting jobs or internships, which is a way to get your foot in the door too. Obviously, I would prefer a paid job but you need to get a start. When I’ve done the course and put so much time and effort into it, I would do whatever is needed to get to the next step.”