Dr. Bryan Fields:

In response to Senator Naughton's point, the skills and labour market research unit has a capacity to carry out employment forecasting based on the ESRI medium-term review. They have three scenarios there and we are basing our forecasting on the recovery scenario, which we now think is the most plausible of the three. We are projecting employment to reach 2.02 million by the year 2020. Our current forecasters are predicting that construction employment will reach approximately 150,000 in 2017. That is in the context where probably the largest category of occupation on the live register is craft-related areas, at roughly 70,000 people.
The labour market research unit has a number of outputs. We host the national skills database, which is a very useful tool, and from that we assist the expert group on future skill needs in a number of publications on an annual basis, most notably the National Skills Bulletin and the training and education outputs. We monitor bricks-and-mortar and online recruitment agencies for vacancies and monitor those trends over time. We also publish for apprenticeship forecasting, and expect to become heavily involved in forecasting for the new apprenticeship council that is to be established shortly.
We conduct follow-up-surveys every two years, and this is an important aspect of what we have been doing, on the training provision since the mid-1990s. Recently we have been doing them every year so we are able to monitor and track the effectiveness of the provision. This year, there have been a couple of developments to expand that into the further education sector. SOLAS is currently working with statisticians from the Department of Education and Skills and the Central Statistics Office with a view to identifying the economic status of former learners who participated in PLC programmes in 2013, for example. The data will be used to complement the results of the follow-up survey which SOLAS has conducted of former FÁS trainees who also attended courses in 2012. We also intend to conduct another follow-up survey in early 2015 of former learners who attended FÁS courses in 2013. We are currently engaged in negotiations with the CSO with a view to gaining access to four major administrative datasets which will enable the skills and labour market research unit to continuously monitor the economic status of former learners on FET outcomes.
On the one hand, we have identification of skills and, on the other, over the next few years we will be able to carry out tracking. That is all very well, but what do we do now? Each year we publish regional labour market profiles which are presented to each of the educational training boards and that breaks down the labour and employment demographics and the supply of education and training by region. That assists with local labour market intelligence, facilitating individual companies contacting further education colleges or local training centres to advise on what provision they ought to put on for the following year.