The start of the year is traditionally one of the busiest for job movement. Between those seeking to enter or re-enter the workforce and those looking for a change, it’s a very active spell. The sense among experts in the recruitment sector is one of cautious optimism about the prospects in 2025.
After a slower than usual year of job creation in 2024, Trayc Keevans, global FDI director at Morgan McKinley, is cautiously optimistic about the 12 months ahead.
“We’re coming out of a year where there was a lot of caution on the part of employers,” Keevans says. “From the multinational side, some of that was due to the US election. We’re hoping to see some of that lift with more confidence in the employment market.
“Really that should be across all sectors. The emphasis is on reskilling and upskilling. AI is having an impact on that as it is changing jobs and also creating new types of jobs.”
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Core growth areas
In terms of where the growth will come from, the easiest way to predict growth is to examine where there are unmet demands for products and services.
![TJ Hunter, senior director onshore, Ireland & UK, Ørsted: 'People are surprised sometimes by the span of careers related to what we do [in the renewables sector]. We develop projects, get them through planning, construct them, trade them, buy them, and sell them.' Photograph: Darragh Kane](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/VWCG5TLFJZF7PNZD4M3WSPHNNQ.jpg?auth=2d6c0cbbdd4cb6858f42b9ff94dc1b9fcf03ea2c963fd60d47f5e3e49eaedd29&width=800&height=533)
“You’ve got to look at the focal points in Ireland right now and housing and infrastructure jump out there,” says TJ Hunter, senior director for onshore in Ireland and the UK at Orsted, a renewable energy business.
“There’s an awful lot that’s needed and it’s a virtuous circle. In order to be productive, we need people and in order to get the people we need to be productive.”
The impact of demand is one that extends beyond the needs just on this island. Paul Vance, head of resourcing at KPMG, says that global needs will also shape the Irish job market.
“Many of Ireland’s sectoral strengths are in areas where there is strong and persistent global demand such as agribusinesses, pharma and tech,” he says.
“Simply put, people need to eat. Health, wellbeing and technology are also clearly important, and this is reflected in consumer demand and demand for related professional services.”
Outside of the end needs of customers, areas where businesses and governments are being pressured to improve will also likely enjoy growth in the year to come.
“Sustainability and the green economy will both have a big push. A lot of companies have already invested on that front,” says Karen O’Brien, recruitment and business manager at Osborne, a recruitment business.
Within industries, the knock-on effects of their demands on other sectors are being recognised. Donal McDaid, director at Arup, says the needs of the engineering and construction sectors would reflect on demand elsewhere.
“We can see tangible growth across a range of sectors in which we work, both from a domestic perspective here in Ireland and in our business more globally,” he says.
“In areas such as infrastructure, mobility and active travel through to tech, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, our pipeline is strong. This creates great opportunities for our people, our most valuable asset, when it comes to realising our vision to shape a better world.”
The AI impact
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rare beast in terms of its impact on the job market. Across sectors and expertise, there’s near unanimity that it’s a force for change in how people will work. The challenge is working out exactly what that will involve.
Even the recruitment sector itself expects to be shaken up internally by the way AI tools will aid it in its operations.
“We’re bombarded every week from recruitment tech start-ups. Everything from screening candidates to CV formatting, there’s a constant barrage. It’s still early days, we’re still working out what products will add value,” says Niall Murray, managing director of recruitment business Collins McNicholas.
“There are certainly some good products that will save time. We were at an event a few weeks ago where we were shown that there will be a personalised service that acts as a talent scout for the recruits.”
These types of tools, Murray says, could result in recruitment agencies offering the same level of service it provides employers to those seeking a new role.
“We could become talent scouts, where someone applies to us. We plug their skill set in, see what companies might want them and make introductions. It’s possibly dangerous, making us a middleman that could be cut out,” he says.
“I’ve heard that several times. I’ve been in the recruitment sector since 1996, we were told job boards would wipe us out and LinkedIn would be the end of us, but we’re still here.”
The broad consensus is that AI is most likely to change roles rather than directly replace them.
“Technology needs smart, insightful people who understand the implications, the risks and the potential benefits of AI. That’s where the opportunities are for our clients and for our business,” Vance says.
“While the headlines might suggest that a robot will take your job, getting the right people to make things happen in AI will remain essential for the foreseeable future. This is good news for tech savvy people, but probably not so good for those not paying attention.”
The speed of change isn’t just in the technology behind AI itself, but the impact it is having on the job market.
“AI and automation are moving at an incredible pace, but so are the jobs associated with them. It’s going to explode next year with all kinds of new things happening,” says Shóna McManus, chief executive of Osborne.
Keevans says that businesses need to take a holistic approach to how AI will change the way they operate. Thinking about the individual jobs it might replace would, she says, be a mistake.
“The impact of AI won’t be on a single job, it will be on job families within businesses. That means it will require bigger thinking across the workforce. The largest impact of AI in the tech sector is that it will make everything more scalable and faster. In terms of employment opportunities, and we see this every few years, new jobs will come to the fore,” says Keevans.
“The biggest wave coming will be with AI, a lot of the roles we’re seeing with AI in the US are going to C-suite level. Once you see that, you know there will be more investment in employment in that area.”
Sustainable change
The impact of AI is one that the renewables sector will feel strongly, according to Hunter. Orsted is already finding ways to use the technology to automate tasks.
“We are stepping into what AI can bring us as well. We’re examining where we can apply it. For example, we have an internal bot we use for several things, including using it to categorise information we gather.”
Hunter is bullish about the potential of the renewable energy industry to create roles in the year to come. He says that there’s a lack of awareness as to the breadth of skills it seeks.
“People are surprised sometimes by the span of careers related to what we do. We develop projects, get them through planning, construct them, trade them, buy them, and sell them,” says Hunter.
“As a result, we have environmentalists on the team, land agents, civil, electrical and mechanical engineers. We have commercial people, operations staff, staff in finance, trading, IT, HR and legal. It goes on to encompass regulatory and public affairs staff as well.”
This makes Hunter confident that the needs of Orsted will be replicated across the whole of the renewable energy sector.
“What we do dips into so many areas. If you came to the fifth floor of the building where we operate in Cork, you’d see people across all those areas. The opportunities to meet the needs of our sector are substantial,” he says.
“We’re going to need skills in all of those areas. The sector needs to get down to the education level, at secondary schools, to get people thinking about renewable energy.”
A mixed bag for financial services
While Hunter is bullish on the potential in the renewables sector, there’s a touch more caution among experts when it comes to financial services.
“Financial services hasn’t been gangbusters in the last 12 months or so. It has held its own and we expect it to hold steady for the next 12 months as well,” says David Walsh, director of commercial development at Osborne.
While the near-term may not present rapid growth for the sector, Murray is confident that Ireland’s track record in the industry will stand to it for future growth.
“With financial services, everywhere you look there are opportunities in the fintech space. We’ve long had a strong financial sector and that links up with our IT sector. That space is only going to grow,” he says.
Keevans expects that synergy between the tech and finance sectors to only lead to more growth in employment.
“We’re seeing a wave of digital transformation in financial services. That’s not just AI, there’s blockchain and regulatory adaptation as well. There’s a huge amount of employment in those digital transformations,” she says.
Construction presents a unique challenge
There’s strong confidence among experts that construction will continue to have robust demand for staff and skills. At the same time, the consensus is that meeting that demand is going to be a struggle.
“Every manifesto at every election says they’ll build 60,000 houses or more a year, but the question is who is going to build them? There needs to be a focus on apprenticeships and a significant push to bring skills in from abroad,” says Murray.
“That may be Irish people that went to Australia or Canada 15 years ago, but that will also have to be supplemented by others.”
There is a chicken and egg scenario. As more houses are needed, more people are needed to build them, but they in turn need places to live.
“The demand in the construction sector is huge. It’s probably the sector that represents the largest skills deficit. No matter how quickly training courses and the talent pipeline are developed, we have to fix the lack of access to accommodation,” Keevans says. “There are some pockets around Ireland proving more successful than others, but it’s not enough to move the dial at bringing that talent back.”
The skills in focus
While the issue of meeting the skills challenge in construction is one of concern, the overall demand for more skilled people in Ireland is something McDaid considers a positive for the economy.
“It’s an exciting time for the country to be experiencing such high levels of growth and it’s great to see our talent pool developing and breaking new ground in a range of emerging skills areas,” he says.
“We also recognise the need to partner with colleagues within the industry to deliver the ever-increasing scale and complexity of our clients’ business and project challenges.”
Vance says that addressing the skills gap has to start early, ensuring that a broader pool of talent enters the workforce.
“Ireland needs to keep revisiting our technology pipeline out of third level. Critically we need to maximise the potential of women who are still underrepresented in the Stem subjects,” he says. “The critical time for this is at the start of second level, where relevant subject choices need to be available for progression to college later on.”