Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

According to the people I have spoken to in the industry ICT skills are not the issue. In fact those skills compare very favourably internationally. The level is not so high in generic skills, such as communication and teamwork. The heads of most of our universities recognise this is a challenge and they are liaising and collaborating with industry to see how best they can incorporate those skills into the provision, not alone in IT but across all third level provision. The model for industry both among multinationals and indigenous industry is collaborative. A team of people is set a challenge to innovate a particular product or service. Our third level colleges have not got their heads around how to reproduce that. The National University of Ireland, Galway, NUIG, has developed an interesting model for a master’s programme to respond to the medical devices sector which employs 8,000 people in Galway city. It brings together medical, engineering and marketing graduates to work together as a team to develop new devices for the medical devices industry. They complete their master's at NUIG but work in that collaborative model all the way up to the point where the device can be marketed commercially. That is the model that industry needs and we need to see more of that at third level.