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Boredom in the work place can be an ordeal – to be slumped in the chair in a listless stupor, either underwhelmed and underchallenged by the mundaneness of the work, or simply through not having enough work, is a dispiriting experience.

A recent report from Dr Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire states that such an existence can even be detrimental for physical and mental health. Dr. Mann is a psychology lecturer at the University, and she recently presented her findings at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology in Chester.
Dr. Mann stated that the overwhelming conlusion of her survey is that boredom is often a direct result of a worker feeling unchallenged in their role. This leads to a fulfillment deficit.
Such common ways of coping with workplace boredom include drinking too much coffee and grazing on chocolate and other snacks. She also highlighted a tendency to drink more alcohol at the end of a boring work day.

There are also productivity concerns in her findings – many of those surveyed firmly stated that boredom contributed to a loss of productivity and also caused them to make more mistakes in their work.

Dr. Mann strongly recommends that workplaces promote healthy snacks. Other means of dealing with boredom that Dr. Mann suggests are that workers be required to multi task rather than be locked into repetitive processes – multi tasking and job rotation can add a dimension of novelty to a worker’s role, and lead to increased productivity.

Stress has been traditionally viewed as a consequence of either too much work or a worker having undefined duties or responsibilities. Dr. Mann believes that boredom is in fact that most pre-dominant stressor in the modern work place.

A happy employee is one who will glance up from their work station, and announce: wow, is it five thirty already? This is an employee who as clearly defined and diverse tasks, ones with parameters and achievable goals, ones that allow the worker a sense of achievement at the end of each working day or week. A worker who enjoys these conditions will be one that never has time to be bored.

Good news today on the jobs front. Two Information Technology companies have announced new jobs – Version One, a provider of Agile Project Management tools, and Ammeon, a cloud computing software company, and announced the respective creation of ninety and twenty new jobs.

With Version One, it is great to see an Irish IT company in expansion. This is a company that has increased turnover by forty per cent and is looking to increase sales by twenty per cent in the coming year.

Information Technology is actually an area that is seeing a shortage of candidates – many Irish IT companies complain that there is an insufficient level of adequately trained jobseekers coming out of Irish colleges, and they are often compelled to look over seas for suitably qualified candidates. The shortage in candidates with the available skills appears to particularly relate to many areas of software and web development, and there seems to be a particular shortfall of Java and PHP developers, and IT / Cloud engineers and architects. This shortfall is often quoted as an impediment to expansion in the IT sector, and is a situation that needs to be addressed if Ireland is to succeed in becoming an international centre for web and IT excellence.

For those whose skills are not so much in demand at the moment, there are opportunities in the Southern Hemisphere. There were close to twelve hundred jobs on offer at The Australia Employment Expo 2011 at the Aviva Stadium over the weekend according to the Irish Times. These jobs were largely in the blue collar, but it is reported that there is a strong demand in Australia for medical candidates. Western Australia has a large demand at the moment for candidate to service the booming oil, gas and mining sectors. In other words, they are desperate for people to shovel their resources into the gaping Chinese mouth.

Australia definitely seems to be an attractive prospect to the Irish unemployed, especially as we endure the dark cold winter evenings, but there has been quite a bit of anecdotal evidence about the negative aspects of working in Australia – firstly, there is the isolation in being so far from home. Secondly, there is the lack of friends or relations – in other words, no sense of community. Thirdly, many emigrants to Australia report that there is something missing in terms of soul or culture. And lastly, there is the rising cost of living – in many places the cost of a coffee is up to 4 euro. That said, there are few jobs here, while Western Australia estimates that it will need one hundred and fifty thousand people to fill jobs over the next five years.