Dr. Ian Jones:

Senator Mullins is starting to sound like my bank manager. My bank manager asked me many of those questions in terms of business growth. How long have we been in business? I founded the company in 2009, so we have been in business for six years. Approximately 40% or 45% of the work is on the education side and the other half is on the technology side. Do we charge? No. For State-funded projects, we do not charge anything on top of that - whether to the individual or the company. There are no placement fees or anything of that nature. We offer private programmes for people working in the pharmaceutical, medical device or food sectors. Our master's degree programmes are popular but there are also many people with a leaving certificate who are working in the pharma sector and who might have been doing so for the past 20 years. They are being encouraged by their employers to start thinking about third level. We are starting to engage with operators and technicians to get their first ever qualifications. That is part-funded by both industry and the employee.

Senator Mullins asked whether we charge on the non-Springboard side. We engage with pharma companies and medical device technology companies to try to develop bespoke programmes for them. However, that is a long process. We try to engage with various pharma companies to improve things, particularly on the pharma business side. Often these companies have supervisors who are good at operating a schedule and managing three or four people. The companies want these supervisors to elevate to team leader or manager positions where they can manage ten people, communicate the plan for the coming three months and so on. These pharma business programmes are proving to be very successful with industry.

There was a question about at-risk companies. It is a tricky question. What are the indicators which determine a company is at risk? I can offer examples of how we engaged with the Lufthansa employees but that case was after the fact. Some of those individuals were unemployed for six months before they came on one of our programmes. We would like to intervene earlier and act as a partner with at-risk companies earlier in the process. Given that I have name-checked Lufthansa, I am keen to point out that those involved have been brilliant employees in the transition to the pharma and medical devices technology sectors. They have high-end skills given their work with engines and other high-end equipment. The transition to the pharma and medical sectors has been quite a success for them.