Interactive Services, a Dublin-based technology firm which sells e-learning courses to telecoms companies, shed more than 20 per cent of its staff yesterday due to lower-than-expected sales growth this year.

The company, which raised about $10 million in venture capital funding last year, said it would make 40 of its 190 staff redundant. The redundancies came just 24 hours after an announcement from another Irish e-learning firm, Smartforce, that it was cutting 81 jobs at its Irish operations.

Analysts said last night that the job losses followed a number of results in the sector which show that corporate spending on IT is not increasing as fast as some people had expected. Mr Garett Byrne, chief executive of Interactive Services, said yesterday the firm would reduce its workforce to make sure the firm got through next year. "Everything just slowed down way below what people were anticipating last year," said Mr Byrne. "We had a pretty good year and grew 60 per cent but not as fast as expected."

Interactive Services develops and sells e-learning courses on how to use complicated telecoms and networking equipment to telecoms firms, one of the worst hit areas of the technology sector. One staff member told The Irish Times yesterday that morale was in the gutter at the firm following the redundancies. He said he felt it may be difficult to get a new job.