Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Increasing Employment through Training: Innopharma Labs

1:30 pm

Dr. Ian Jones:

It is less about the formulation of the course and more the case that they would contact us, on foot of which we would engage with them. They would be familiar with the content of our courses. We have people on the road every day engaging with food, pharma and medtech companies, in addition to recruitment companies. We try to trigger vacancies and hiring, especially among small and medium-sized companies. Especially in the medtech and food sectors, there are smaller businesses and there is always concern over hiring people. They feel hassled figuring out who they should hire. That we are removing some of these barriers and making it easier for companies to hire people is helping them. We get calls from larger medtech or pharma companies if they are going through a major change. They might need five or ten extra staff, particularly at operator level, because they have got more orders and because their projections for the following year are looking really strong.