Mr. Ray English:

I will try to answer some of the Senator's points. As winners of the Department's silver medal, we always consider Ms Leane, Mr. McSherry, Ms Yeates and Mr. Twomey national champions. We are keen to develop how those national champions go and engage with second-level schools and students. We would like to include that outreach from the schools base outwards in our work plan.

We also have longer-term plans not only to link the national competitions but to create junior school competitions alongside them. We can link second-level students into the junior school competitions and get junior school students to participate in appropriate competitions. Those students are then learning and feeding in, which will engage second-level students even more.

The third spoke in that wheel is that we are looking to develop skills packages from targeted industries for transition-year students. We must engage further with transition year. If we can supply materials to them that would engage them and if they look at the competitions available and the skills and careers packages, they might get a focus and become invested.

We must acknowledge the work of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, IGC. It is helpful to us in World Skills Ireland. We have created some videos for the IGC and it is distributing them through its networks. It is keen to promote apprenticeship programmes and particular skills. That should be acknowledged.

We are also involved in looking at the need for digitisation and its increase with one of Worlds Skills Ireland's partners, namely, Autodesk. We have set up, and are currently running, a series of online engagements for anybody who wants to come along. It is like a massive open online course, MOOC, for Fusion 360, which is used particularly in mechanical and manufacturing industries. We are inviting anyone to come along and engage with this programme and allowing them to get the first visualisation of what Fusion 360 looks like. Free certification will be provided for those who want it. This is something we are looking to add on. It has worked successfully. The first roll-out of the programme involved 75 people and in the first online training session, we are hoping to grow that and then expand into other offerings, such as building information modelling, that might lead people into the construction side.

To return to the Senator's point, we anticipate digitalisation will have a strong impact on the building industry. That might change perceptions. The industry is never not going to be noisy and it will never be totally clean because it is still using cement, etc. However, for gender balance, the digitalisation side is one that could work. Building information modelling is ubiquitous in Irish industry now and that should provide a pathway to gender balance in that career. We can look to promote that. There is a strong opportunity in that regard.