Mr. Ned Costello:

I thank the joint committee for the invitation to discuss these important issues relating to skills in ICT, foreign languages and food production and technology. I also thank the joint committee for its recent review of ICT skills demand, the launch of which I had the opportunity to attend a few weeks ago. In preparing for this meeting with colleagues, we were conscious of the need to avoid excessive duplication in our submissions to the joint committee and, therefore, in the accompanying Irish Universities Association, IUA, submission, we thought it would be helpful to begin by considering the general labour market position, both overall and on a sectoral level. In this regard, I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the FÁS skills and labour market research unit, who are responsible for the publication, Monitoring Ireland's Skills Supply.

The enterprise needs into which the joint committee is inquiring span industry and services and these sectors are of enormous importance in GDP and exporting terms. While by and large, they are characterised by high levels of productivity, it must be remarked that such growing productivity, combined with the effects of the recession, in some respects militates against their employment performance.

In that regard, employment in the industrial sector declined at an average of 4.6% per annum, with total employment contracting by 61,000 in the period since 2006. That is the overall sectoral position but within that picture, however, there are positive signs. In particular, employment in the food and beverages industry recently has bucked the trend by expanding by 13% between 2010 and 2011. Likewise, employment in medium to high technology manufacturing expanded by 4.6%, albeit that the pure high technology employment figure did not fare quite as well. Clearly, the labour market in the sector remains somewhat volatile. Employment in knowledge intensive services, the complement to manufacturing, performed better overall, with total employment averaging 815,000 in 2011 and growing by an average of 1.2% per annum since 2006.

If one turns to ICT specifically, the segment performed better than the overall sector average, growing employment by 1.5% per annum on average. However, there has been a notable increase in employment recently in that the sector added 6,000 jobs between 2010 and 2011. This was an increase of 8.5%, which clearly is an improvement on the historical trend. From previous experience, which is relevant to matching skills supply and educational output, it is known that the ICT sector can be both volatile and cyclical. Therefore, it is difficult to state whether the current highly encouraging increases in employment represent a genuine deflection point in the curve of growth and whether this upward trend will continue, but of course we are optimistic that it will.

A challenge for both industry and the higher education sector is the interface between skills and labour shortages. In this regard, in the sectors under review, it is likely that the shortages are a mix of the two. Our submission refers to the various vacancy surveys, which indicate that employers frequently seek staff with both a minimum of two years' experience and specific skills, which can be in quite narrow sub-disciplinary areas of technology. This brings into focus the importance of conversion courses, to which Mr. Boland referred, part-time education and internships, and that there are more routes into such jobs than simply directly from third level.

Before speaking in detail about education outputs in their specific sectors, I refer to section 4 of our submission, in which we provide a breakdown of employment by sector and both enrolments and graduations by discipline. This was supplied to demonstrate the function of higher education is to meet the overall skills needs of the economy. In that regard, it can be seen from the tables contained in the submission that the sectoral make-up of employment is quite well matched by a similar diversity in the overall intake and output of higher education.

However, reverting to sectoral issues, there are strong levels of participation in science, mathematics and computing, as well as in engineering, which make up 18% and 8%, respectively, of the total undergraduate enrolments. At postgraduate level, computer science as a discipline accounts for 31% of total full-time science, mathematics and computing enrolments. In meeting the skills needs of the economy, there are elements of push and pull at work, in the sense that increased labour market demand influences student choice and, at the same time, increasing supply can have a positive momentum in the creation of new firms and new jobs. In the latter regard, we refer in our submission to the increase of 63% in Central Applications Office science, technology, mathematics and engineering applications between 2008 and 2012.

We also refer to how investments in research in the education sphere are paying off. This is reflected in an increase of almost 2,000 in the numbers of researchers working in business between 2001 and 2009. That is the latest data we have. The success of the national research and innovation strategy is also reflected in the growing proportion of new FDI projects in the research space and the expansion of Irish multinationals, such as the Kerry Group's recent announcement of a major research and development project to be located in the Naas region. These efforts will be further focused by the outworking of the research prioritisation exercise and we reflect that in the submission.
In terms of meeting future skills demands of the economy in the technology sector, we place particular emphasis on the importance of mathematics as a foundation discipline and we refer in our submission to the importance of bonus points for mathematics in increasing the uptake of mathematics and increasing attainment in the leaving certificate on foot of it.
As regards the languages issue, it is more difficult to pin down than ICT skills which map well to individual disciplines in higher education and lend themselves to the kind of initiatives that are now being pursued under the ICT action plan. This has surfaced in the EGFSN skills for trade report, on which we are actively engaging with the universities.
Encouragingly, because of modularisation it is likely that there is more exposure on the part of students to language education than the EGFSN report may have been able to capture when it was undertaken. It is also worth noting that HEA data from 2007-10 show a welcome 12.9% increase in undergraduate student enrolments in foreign languages, where these are taken as full degree programmes. This is despite stagnating or decreasing number of students taking foreign languages during the same period for the leaving certificate. Clearly, that is a pipeline issue that needs to be addressed.
Finally on this topic, we also refer to the importance of internationalisation in higher education. This encompasses foreign students studying in Ireland and also study abroad by Irish students. I might mention a development that has happened since we made our submission. We are concerned about the increase in the visa charge which was announced recently by the GNIB. The doubling of that charge will not do anything for our competitiveness in the international education market.
I am conscious of time, so I would like to conclude by referring briefly to the issue of broad skills. We refer in our submission to the industry round table, which is a high level reflection of the constant interaction between the universities and industry in identifying matters of common concern and addressing them. Our submission includes a progress report from the last round table meeting.
One issue that arises regularly is the importance of transversal skills such as creativity and problem solving. In this regard, it is vital that education does not become overly instrumentalist and narrow. This was a concern raised with us by the Minister for Education and Skills when he asked us to look at selection and entry mechanisms for higher education. As part of that work we are looking at how common entry routes to university can be expanded, both to broaden the first year experience and also to facilitate upstream change in the leaving certificate. For balance, we are also looking at whether we can better incentivise strategically important subjects going beyond what we have done with bonus points for maths. We are therefore looking both at the broad and the specific. In that regard, we will be reporting to the Minister on those issues by year end.