More science and data skilled graduates needed in Ireland

9 Jan 2014

EMC, an American multinational technology company that employs 3,000 people in Ireland, has called on Irish school-leavers next year to opt for degrees in computer and data science to meet demand.

To coincide with the BT Young Scientist Competition this week, one of Ireland’s largest employers, EMC, will be calling on another 3,000 graduates to fill what it perceives to be expected demand in the IT and science sectors.

According to the report published last November by Forfás, 44,000 new IT jobs are expected to become available in Ireland between now and 2018 in an already increasingly competitive sector.

Speaking about the statement, EMC’s vice president and managing director of the EMC Centre based in Cork, Bob Savage, said: “The global IT sector is expanding, and Ireland will need skilled graduates to take up jobs in emerging areas like cloud, big data and IT security.

Continuing he said: “As our students weigh up their CAO applications over the next few weeks, we urge them to consider courses in science, technology, engineering and maths because, over the coming decade, the global technology sector will expand and we need skilled Irish graduates to take up new high-quality jobs.”

Highly-employable sector

The latest figures from the CSO show that Ireland currently has over 108,000 people working in the scientific and technical sectors making it one of the single largest employment sectors in the country.

Further expectations are being placed on the future of integration between businesses and how they interact with their customers in person and online: “Increasingly, companies are seeing the value that data can bring to their business,” says Gerry Murray, EMC’s country manager in Ireland.

“For example supermarkets and high-street stores are routinely collating social media information, blog content, analyst research and purchasing data in order to reveal consumer buying trends and correlations to customer loyalty.

“As well as the increasing demand for data science specialists, new and existing companies still need computer programmers, software developers, engineers, support technicians with languages, and others.”

Colm Gorey
By Colm Gorey

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic. He joined in January 2014 and covered AI, IoT, science and anything that will get us to Mars quicker. When not trying to get his hands on the latest gaming release, he can be found lost in a sea of Wikipedia articles on obscure historic battles and countries that don't exist any more, or watching classic Simpsons episodes far too many times to count.

Loading now, one moment please! Loading