The starting salary, salary scale and possible promotion prospects are the three things that job candidates tend to focus on during the interview process, even if they shy away from mentioning them during the "have you any questions for us?" part of their interrogation.

Despite the fact that they are essentially deferred pay, pensions often don't get a look in. But not all pension schemes are the same: some are significantly better than others. Researching what type of pension scheme an employer offers before accepting a job offer could mean the difference between a comfortable retirement and a strapped one. Employers are legally obliged to offer employees access to a pension scheme.

There are two main types of occupational pension schemes: defined-benefit schemes and defined-contribution schemes.

Defined-benefit pensions, also known as final-salary schemes, are the best kind of pension scheme, because they guarantee members a pension based on a proportion of their final salary for each year of service with the company.

For example, if the proportion of salary granted under the scheme is 1/60th, a worker who is employed at the company for 30 years will receive an annual pension worth half of their final salary (as 30/60ths equals one half).

Of course, it doesn't typically work out like that. Nowadays, three decades is considered a long stretch, with even the most benevolent of employers.

People take career breaks, they receive their first invite into a pension scheme late on in their working lives and they switch from job to job.

But even with broken service, being a member of a defined-benefit scheme will be financially advantageous.

Once workers have belonged to the scheme for two years or more, the value of their contributions and their employer's contributions is preserved and they will receive some level of benefit on retirement. Leave before the end of this two-year "vesting period", and workers will only receive back the value of their own contributions, less tax.

As employers are essentially promising to pay the pension from workers' retirement dates to the day that they die, defined-benefit pension schemes are expensive for them to fund.

Employees typically have around 5-8 per cent of their salary deducted every month and redirected into the pension scheme, receiving tax relief on their contributions.

But in many cases, in order to meet their future liabilities and satisfy minimum funding rules set by the Pensions Board, the employer invests a further contribution of up to 18 per cent of workers' salaries on their behalf.

This expense means that membership of defined-benefit pensions is becoming increasingly exclusive. The schemes now exist mostly in the public service and among older, larger companies and in the private sector many are now closed to new members.

Many firms now offer inferior defined-contribution pensions that offer no guarantees and expose workers' contributions to the ups and downs of the stock market.

Under a typical defined-contribution scheme, both the employee and the employer contribute about 5 per cent of the employee's salary, despite warnings from the Irish Association of Pension Funds and others that about double this rate of contribution is needed to fund an "adequate" pension in retirement.

This money is invested in a pension fund linked to the stock market. The pension that the employee receives when they retire is based on the sum total of their contributions plus any investment returns.

This usually results in a much lower pension than a defined-benefit scheme.

So if a jobseeker is offered two identical jobs, both with the same rate of pay and conditions but differing pension schemes, the company offering the defined-benefit scheme is the one whose offer should be gratefully accepted.

But if a defined-contribution pension is all that's on the table, then it will be far better to join it than have no pension at all. And thanks to the principle of compound interest, the earlier people invest in their pension, the larger the pension fund they will have when the time comes to log off for the final time.

Employers must at the very least give employees access to a type of pension known as a standard Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) and deduct contributions to the PRSA through payroll at your request. But they don't currently have to contribute any money to it.

All that could be set to be change as part of the Government's campaign to increase pensions coverage.

Mandatory pensions in which both employers and employees must contribute a fixed percentage of earnings have been examined as part of the Pensions Board's review of national pensions strategy, which has been submitted to Minister for Social and Family Affairs Séamus Brennan.

The system of tax relief on contributions may also be changed so that putting money into a pension is as attractive to lower-paid workers, who may be outside the tax net or only pay tax at the standard 20 per cent rate, as it is to higher-paid workers, who can claim tax relief at their marginal 42 per cent rate.

The contents of the national pensions review should become known next year, but 2006 will be a transitional year in the pensions world for another reason.

A new EU pensions directive, signed into law in the Republic in September, will eventually lead to the creation of cross-border pensions.

A multinational employer, who currently must run separate pension schemes for each country, will be able to choose just one country as the home for a pan-European pension.

The industry here is talking up the Republic as the ideal home for cross-border schemes, but in theory, Irish employees of multinationals could end up contributing to a pension fund based in the UK, France, Germany or any other EU country.

Other EU proposals mean that workers will be able to move jobs and country without losing any of their work pension benefits.

For the moment, however, pensions are still the same complicated, unglamorous but extremely valuable workplace benefit to have in an employment contract.