Mr. Brendan McGinty:

On the issue of promotion, I accept the point made by Deputy Jan O'Sullivan about the importance of connecting locally. In our experience in Skillnet Ireland, the capacity to engage locally through social media and all the various other channels such as local media is important. Again, we have had some valuable experience around what works and does not. I would be happy to share that with the committee.

Women being offered flexibility of options in training is important. To be fair, our experience is that employers are much more sensitive to that, not least because they have a challenge trying to attract people into their businesses. Obviously, people are testing employers to see the career mobility options available. Part of that is how the training approach is done. There is a much greater willingness to look at more flexible, modular, part-time evening programmes of one form or another. Back in the day, parts of retailing might have been described as just a job in a shop. It is not just a job in the shop and employers have grasped that issue. Through the work done with ourselves, there is now an active presentation of a full career in retailing, whereby people, predominantly women, are having prior learning recognised. We are working with the qualification bodies to ensure, in a systematic way, that people who may not have a leaving certificate but have worked in a retail environment for five or ten years can have that experience recognised as a stepping stone towards career progression. People can have their skill sets properly recognised and certified up to allowing for career progression whereby they can now have a degree in retail management practice at level 7 in the qualifications framework. That is significantly powerful and impactful. From a business perspective, it is important because it is attracting somebody into the sector, giving them an opportunity to see ahead and retaining them within the sector.

What is happening to the cohort of people in their 40s and 50s? That is an important issue. We have had that experience when the construction sector collapsed and the challenges presented in terms of cross-skilling and getting people retrained in new sectors such as green energy and sustainability. Even around the unfortunate experience of closures, we have been heavily involved in supporting workers who have been impacted by closures such as Coty in Tipperary, Hewlett-Packard in Kildare, TalkTalk in Waterford, Cameron in Longford and so on. One has to have a response to cater for those particular requirements. That has worked but it is about tailoring the response, the agility of the response and working collaboratively with other agencies. We have been able to bring that very much to the focus of the task in hand.