Talent shortages in key areas of the economy are acting as a constraint on growth. Skillnet Ireland, the workforce development agency, recently published Ireland’s Talent Landscape, a major business survey.
It found that 60 per cent of businesses reckon the availability of qualified and highly skilled workers is going to be an increasingly critical factor for business success in the coming years. Yet 41 per cent of businesses are already having difficulty recruiting people with the requisite skills.
Skills seen as vital for future competitiveness but “challenging” in terms of availability range from financial risk management to technical and engineering, to marketing, but emerging fields such as artificial intelligence and big data analysis were also cited.
With such gaps emerging, upskilling of existing staff is now a significant lever for employers. More than 70 per cent of businesses engaged in some form of upskilling or training programme within the previous 12 months, the report found. However, it also found that 27 per cent had not done so, mainly due to time constraints or lack of awareness of the range of enterprise-driven supports available.
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That’s a concern, given that businesses are seeing their skills requirements constantly evolve, with more than half reporting a shift in their core skills in the past two to three years, and six in 10 anticipating further changes in the coming three years. It isn’t just about coping with challenges – having the right skills is essential for capitalising on opportunities too.
Another study by Skillnet Ireland, Building Our Potential, Ireland’s Offshore Wind Skills and Talent Needs, provides a comprehensive analysis of the opportunities for Irish businesses to be part of delivering the target of 37 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2050, for example.
The report shows that significant investment in training and skills development will be needed to maximise the economic benefit to the State from the development of offshore wind farms.
It maps out the entire skills requirement ahead, from design of infrastructure through to installation and maintenance.
“It also identifies the transferable skills that would allow people in mid-career from other sectors – such as, say, civil engineering – to ‘bridge’ into the offshore wind sector,” explains Dave Flynn, Skillnet Ireland’s director of business networks.
Following on from that initiative, Skillnet has partnered with Wind Energy Ireland, the renewable energy representative body, to launch the Skillnet Offshore Wind Academy.
This new national initiative aims to support professionals interested in making such a career switch, helping to rapidly create a pipeline of skilled workers for the sector.
The workforce training agency is also working with businesses to scope out their skills needs in relation to artificial intelligence, another area of opportunity.
“Lots of companies are beginning to talk about AI and are looking at it in terms of projects and policies. But a key question a lot of them are asking is what the real business value of AI is, and how do we figure that out,” says Flynn.
Currently the most prevalent use cases relate to productivity, marketing and customer experience. While AI exploded into the public consciousness with the launch of generative AI two years ago, ICT Skillnet actually developed the first master’s course in AI in Ireland as far back as 2018, Flynn points out.
But not every business will require a full master’s degree. Business leaders, for example, might prefer a shorter programme that will enable them to see what AI will and won’t do for their business, and identify the projects in which to engage with it.
“It’s about trying to equip people at different levels of business with the right level of knowledge and expertise required for them to make the best use of it,” Flynn explains.
Interestingly, one of the most significant talent issues emerging for businesses is what he calls “reluctant leadership”, a growing phenomenon.
“This is a group of people who are operating across companies in a range of different sectors, who are in mid-management roles and who, within their businesses, are the people that would be identified for the senior leadership roles within the next three to five years. But actually, in talking to them, they have found that those individuals are not prepared and do not want to take on those senior leadership roles,” says Flynn.
Among the main barriers is a reluctance to move up the corporate ladder where such a move risks upending the person’s work-life balance.
“They are typically more interested in getting the right balance in terms of their health and wellbeing and have seen that the senior leadership team roles are very difficult, and [are] ‘always on’ type roles, with both a political dimension and a risk dimension to them,” Flynn explains. “That’s because if you’re in a senior leadership team role, and you make mistakes it can have professional and reputational consequences.”
For employers, the best way to address this jam in the talent pipeline is through a close examination of their corporate culture.
“It’s about looking at how complex decisions are made at senior leadership team level,” says Flynn. “It’s about senior leaders role modelling the benefits. It’s also about operating the business in such a way that it makes good ethical decisions that have a positive impact not just in terms of customers but of staff and society generally.
“It’s also about nurturing potential future leaders through the years so that they fully understand that the benefits of moving into a senior leadership team role far outweigh the challenges that come with it.”
