Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 April 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

European Year of Skills 2023: Discussion

Mr. Ray English:

I believe there is. The National Apprenticeship Office does a fantastic job of promoting skills. You can see the range. There are now 76 apprenticeships but we can only showcase 30 because of space limitations. How do we get more in there to show the greater diversity in the offerings that are available? That is one element of it. The thought behind national skills week was, since we have something here, can we roll it out and get more going on around the country? In the feedback from the European Year of Skills, you can see there was a map with little flags showing things going on all over Europe. Why can we not do that locally across all of the social partners to show everything that is going on and the work that Skillnet Ireland, AHEAD and other organisations do? These are fantastic inputs. The Irish Traveller Movement is also putting substantial resources into promoting apprenticeships. If we can get all of that together, we can really do something significant. That is really our call to action as to what comes next.