Ms Barbara Gerstenberger:

I thank members for their interesting questions. I will not be able to comment on all of them, given the time constraints, but in my response I will focus on job quality, the skills gap and the priorities for education.

We can certainly have a framework and indicator for job quality. We know perfectly well, and not just in Eurofound, what a good job is all about. Pay is an important element but prospects are important, and that may be the reason so many young Irish people who had a job left the country. The physical strains and risks associated with work are important as well as psychosocial risks associated with work which are becoming increasingly important. For example, nurses, teachers and so on are under a very different kind of stress from those who do more physical work. There is also the issue of the intensity of the work and the level of autonomy people have in the workplace. Lack of autonomy could be a reason young people leave what looks like a perfectly good job, because they do not feel they can develop in that job. Last but not least, working time is the fourth key aspect of a good quality job. The working time should not be too long. Length plays a role but the other important aspect is discretion over working time, the degree of flexibility in the working time and how the person can adapt the working day to his or her non-work commitments. Researchers will give slightly different weighting to the aspects of a job, but in principle we know what makes a good job and what makes it risky. An indicator can be developed and then we can measure whether we are moving towards better quality jobs or in the other direction.