Masonite provides staff with training in a bid to beat low-cost rivals, writes Gabrielle Monaghan.

As more multinationals shift production from Ireland to lower-cost economies in eastern Europe and Asia, many Irish manufacturing companies are fretting about their long-term survival. Masonite Ireland, a subsidiary of Canada's Masonite International, came up with a novel solution.

When the company ran into difficulty after a change of ownership in 2001 and was forced to lay off 45 staff, Masonite decided that its remaining employees should work smarter instead of harder and introduced third-level education to the factory floor.

Some of the challenges were more than daunting. The company is based in Carrick-on-Shannon, 37 miles away from the nearest college, in Sligo. Most of Masonite's 330 staff worked rotating shifts, and many had never pursued education after finishing the Leaving Certificate.

The factory, which makes moulded doorskins for the European market, contacted the Institute of Technology in Sligo about providing a national certificate in combined engineering course on-site.

The company kitted out its factory with training and study rooms, computers and videoconferencing facilities. Sligo IT allowed its lecturers to travel to the plant, enabling Masonite workers to study between shifts.

"We asked ourselves how our employees could avail of third-level education, so we brought the mountain to Muhammad," said Niall McEvoy, a former part-time lecturer at Sligo IT who now runs Masonite's human resources department.

Classes are held at the factory two evenings a week, from 5.30pm to 9.30pm.

The schedule even enables Masonite workers to complete the courses faster than part-time students outside the company.

Nineteen workers graduated from the national certificate course and nine of those went on to study a degree in mechatronics, a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering.

By last April, Masonite had introduced a second degree programme, a BSc in manufacturing management designed especially for the processes used at its wood engineering plant. Sligo IT developed the course not just for Masonite, but for the entire manufacturing industry in Ireland.

"We hope we can deliver this course to the wider regions in order to generate efficiencies and to embed an educated culture that will take manufacturing industry to the next level," said Peter Gavican, the commercial projects manager at Sligo IT, who helped set up the course.

Although further education is costing Masonite €250,000, the increase in productivity at the plant has been "huge", McEvoy said. The company was also the only Irish manufacturing firm to be shortlisted for the HR Innovation Awards last year.

For the workers, the benefits include greater self-confidence and promotion to more technically demanding roles, such as laboratory technicians and process optimisation engineers.

"If you do the same job, day in, day out, it gets stale," said Fergus Harman, a 34-year-old Masonite employee who quit education after his Leaving Certificate. Harman is studying for a degree at the factory.

"If this course wasn't available to me, further education would never be on my mind at this point in time, especially with a family of four," he added. The concepts of lifelong learning and personal development are now key to the national effort to upskill the economy, Turlough O'Sullivan, director general of employers' federation Ibec, said in a report late last year. But the Republic still has much progress to make in this respect.

Our level of lifelong learning ranks as one of the lowest in Europe, according to the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF). About 10 per cent of Irish people aged between 25 and 64 are involved in lifelong learning, compared with 34 per cent in Sweden and 21 per cent in the UK.

Some 13 per cent of Irish young people leave school early and their unemployment rate is 18 per cent, despite Government spending of €636 million a year on educational disadvantage, according to the NESF.

"In order to position itself amongst the most advanced economies in the world, Ireland must match the investment and commitment to training evident in other countries, including Sweden, Denmark and Japan," O'Sullivan said in his report.

More than 40 per cent of our male population of working age is low skilled, compared with just 20 per cent in Germany.

Low-skilled workers in the manufacturing industry are most at risk of being made redundant, and need preventative retraining measures, the NESF advised in a report earlier this month.

A key challenge to securing Ireland's future prosperity is creating greater equality of opportunity, the NESF said. A more equal labour force would lead to a more productive and higher-skilled workforce and would help make Irish companies more competitive, the NESF argued.

Current structures for promoting labour market policies and social inclusion are too complicated because they comprise eight Government departments and 13 separate agencies, the NESF said.

The forum recommends the Government puts in place a programme by the end of next year to allow at least 5,000 low-skilled young workers to receive training each year for five years.