Dr. Ian Jones:

That is a good question. This all goes back to 2010 and it relates to the Deputy's first question about which aspect of our activities came first. I did a programme in Harvard in 2008 in the course of which I engaged with Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a number of projects. I was very interested in what I saw there, which was a really strong emphasis on education coupled with research and development activity and technology commercialisation. Nobody else in Ireland is doing what we do in the area of technology development. In fact, there are only a few companies in the world that do what we do in terms of the centres and technologies we develop. In 2009, when we were trying to figure out the risks that were presenting for our company, one of the issues we identified was that there were not many people who could service and sell our technologies and understand pharmaceutical processes in the way we needed them to do. In other words, we identified a need to develop our own skilled people. At that time there was a labour market activation fund call for education, and we worked with ITT Dublin to put in a call around that.

The typical graduate participating on that programme was an unemployed person who had perhaps worked formerly in the construction sector, had a civil engineering or architecture qualification and was good at managing people and projects. Together with ITT Dublin, we developed a level 8 special purpose award with a pharmaceutical focus which formed a subset of participants' final year degree in science. That programme was delivered over a six-month period, the objective being to bring people who were working in the construction sector through a successful transition to the pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors. That is an example of one of our programmes. In subsequent years, we listened to industry in order to understand where the unemployment challenges were. As a result, we went down the education ladder to level 6, to provide a pharma, medtech or food entry-type qualification for people with a leaving certificate. We also went up the ladder to provide a master's programmes for graduates who want to work in an analytical laboratory. Those graduates might come from an environmental science or forensics background but do not understand the tablet manufacturing side of things. The master's programme allowed them to transition into laboratory analyst roles in the pharma sector.