Mr. Tony O'Donnell:

I will follow on from the points made by Mr. Davitt. I work for SAP, the largest company in Germany. It is also an IT company and we have made a very significant investment in research and development in Ireland. Much of the time when one hears about technology companies in Ireland, the media report on companies of which consumers are aware and their operations do not necessarily align with research and development, but there is very significant investment by multinationals in research and development. As a German company, SAP has benefited significantly from this model in Germany. People coming through this model, as well as the more classic academic model, achieve very high levels of responsibility and have excellent promotional and career paths within a company such as SAP.

Let me give an example of how one can progress through this model. My own boss in Germany is very senior within our global business intellegence network, a €1 billion a year business. He came through this model, in which he was partly educated on the job and partly educated through other programmes. It works very well.

From an industry point of view, the big challenge for us is the sustainability and reliability of the pipeline of qualified people coming to us. We are having this conversation at several levels on education. When it comes to competition we do not compete as SAP with IBM in Ireland, we compete with other locations in the global market. We compete by demonstrating that we have a dependable pipeline of qualified people with a range of skills to perform a range of roles. Irish industry and the FDI companies are very keen to support anything that we can do from an industry point of view to enable that differentiated recruitment base. We totally endorse the model about which we are speaking here and we have benefited from the existing FET model. So far in the FIT model we have had FIT students working as interns, FIT graduates who were acquired as permanent hires afterwards. It is a model that we know works.

As Mr. Davitt said, the question is how to achieve the same outcomes of scale. Industry is very supportive of that. In addition, industry is having conversations with third level institutions, for example, I am involved with Engineers Ireland and we have specifically identified the lack of ICT education in secondary schools as a pump-priming problem such that when students reach third level or these programmes, we can be reasonably confident that good people will come out at the other end. We are not getting enough people into that system in the first place to guarantee the volume on the output side. Industry is very keen to support and be engaged with second level as well.

Senator Cullinane spoke about language skills and so on. We are aware of that problem but that is a conversation for another day because it would not fall within the ambit of what we are discussing here today.