Moville’s unemployment levels were 29.2% according to the census in 2011. It’s likely to be higher now. At the worst of the Great Depression in America unemployment hit 30%. So, Moville’s economy is basically at Great Depression levels and a lot worse than recession levels. It is double the Irish unemployment rate which is 15% – and yet there is one job where they are crying out for people and at good wages too.
IT
IT is one of the few jobs in Ireland where there is a shortage of workers. I remember reading a year ago that there were 78,000 people employed in IT in Ireland. Now I see that in just the 2nd half of last year the number of IT jobs went up by 7%.
Now, I see that there is such a shortage of IT workers that the Government is planning to import them. That’s such as shame when there are so many people here out of work.
It seems that here are 5,000 unfilled IT jobs in Ireland. The Government intend to give out an extra 700 permits to allow highly skilled (and I assume cheap) IT workers to come here. The usual place they come from is India.
Good Idea
With so many of our highly qualified youngsters with university and college degrees out of work or working in bars or restaurants it might be an idea for some of the youngsters now at the Community College to look at IT as a career. It looks as if they will be fighting for you when you come out of university.
Even those at college or university now, or who already hold degrees in non-IT related subjects should consider it. The pay is good and there are plenty of jobs seemingly, growing by about 15% a year even in these austere times. Some people, especially girls, get put off by the image of IT but it is such a varied industry that there are lots of different jobs in it.
Business Analyst
If you don’t like coding you could become a Business Analyst, i.e. someone who finds out what the customers or business users want from a computer system and then write that out in English for the programmers to code into a computer language. The main skills here are being able to communicate and write lucidly.
If you go on to become a freelancers in IT you could be earning around €400 a day. That’s not bad is it. You can usually go freelance after getting about 3 years experience.
It just seems a shame that with so many Moville youngsters ending up disappointed when they leave university or college that the Irish Government is making plans to import IT workers because the country is not producing enough of them.
If you are looking for a career have a think about IT.