WILLIAM Grogan, a Dubliner who owns his own computer programming firm, believes strongly that young people from deprived areas with no formal academic qualifications can become superb programmers.
Last year he and three friends - a community activist, an accountant and a civil servant - set up the Clondalkin Information Technology Initiative to provide computer programming courses for local unemployed young people.
Nine young men and six young women graduated from the first nine month CITI course last month. Some 13 of them have already found full time jobs with companies ranging from Digital, Gateway and Intel to America On Line, while the other two are working part time. Three weeks ago, 15 more trainees started a second course.
CITI's courses have so far been funded by a £200,000 grant from the EU Youthstart programme, together with support from FAS in the form of trainee allowances.
Now CITI has applied to the Department of Enterprise and Employment for money from the Government's recently established skills shortages programme to train another 60 young people. And the EU has invited representatives from the initiative to go to Stockholm in October to show how a successful Youthstart project can provide good jobs for young people from high unemployment areas.
William Grogan says the best computer programmer he ever employed had not even taken his Junior Certificate exam. He believes the computer industry can provide "real opportunities for disadvantaged people to break out of the cycle of poverty and unemployment". He points to the impressive fact that not one of the first group of CITI trainees was working before the course; yet within a month of finishing it, all of them had jobs.
"We have proved that with proper training courses people from a poor academic background can get high quality career jobs." He is convinced that hundreds of bright young people in areas like north Clondalkin, who are currently stacking shelves in supermarkets or working on community employment schemes, could be trained and quickly taken on by the computer industry, with huge knock on effects for that community's self image and self esteem.
He is concerned that the Department of Education will channel most of the money in the Government's skills shortage fund towards university based computer courses. He believes that the mainly US computer and software companies in Ireland are too influenced by American employment practice, which demands graduates for jobs like programming where non graduates could be equally, if not more, qualified.
"The government has set up that fund as an emergency measure to provide programmers and other computer professionals quickly. Dedicated projects like CITI can produce such people in a year, where it would take universities four years, and can at the same time help to solve the unemployment problem in disadvantaged areas.
