Mr. Tony Donohoe:

On design thinking, which is what we are talking about here, the prescription is not new, as the Deputy pointed out. It has been around for a while. When we produced the Winning by Design report in 2017, we had quite a challenge in getting the education system to understand what we meant by design. When people think of design, they think of aesthetic design, and people were not thinking beyond that. Nevertheless, we are making progress.

We produced a follow-up report on digital design, which is very important now. It is not just about the technology; it is about how people use it. That has been behind the success of the most successful technology companies. They often do not have the best technology, but they have design that would encourage people to use it and tap into what people want. There is also product design and redesign, as well as strategic design and how we look at our businesses.

There is an implementation group working on that and we will hear a report from it at the meeting after this. I will definitely bear in mind what the Deputy is suggesting. Another group is addressing the specific challenges for SMEs more generally and not just on design thinking. We can come back to see what part of the journey we are on.

I mentioned the benchmarking tool initially. There are other initiatives encouraging them to take up more formal training. There tends to be a resistance to formal training. In human resources management, in its broadest sense there seem to be gaps in recruitment and managing performance. We can revert to the Deputy on how we might move that conversation on.

The Deputy is right about the challenge of how to promote apprenticeships. The new apprenticeship office should be the single repository to which companies post job vacancies. We have done this in the past with the much-maligned JobBridge. I do not want to get into a debate about it; I actually thought it was a good thing at the time. It had a single repository of internship opportunities that companies could post to. It had the IT infrastructure.

I do not think we should do it on a sectoral basis because many apprenticeships now are more occupationally based than sectorally based. An occupation in a high-end regulated food manufacturer could also share more or less the same characteristics as in biopharma manufacturing in a highly regulated environment. By focusing on sectors, we might be missing a trick. We need somewhere where employers can post apprenticeships where people can access them very quickly. At the moment it is quite dispersed across education and training boards, ETBs, etc. I understand there are efforts in that regard with apprenticeship.ie.

I take the Deputy's point on inertia in the system; it is like moving the Titanic. I would not fully agree that we are just impacting at the margins. I would have no problems calling out particular sectors. The institutes of technology, some of which have now become technological universities, have traditionally worked quite well based on my experience with enterprise. That was part of their DNA and was what defined them from their origins back as technical colleges. Those interventions, some of which I have mentioned such as skill nets and the human capital initiative, are more than things that are happening around the margins. The human capital initiative pillar 3 is about innovation in the higher education sector. This is about making the sector more responsive. We are making progress. I have been working in this area for many years and the responsiveness of our education system is better than it was 15 years or more ago.