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.