How to stay ahead of rapid change

When Hewlett-Packard began the search for a location for its new InkJet manufacturing facility, the company visited a number of European countries and made a shortlist, which included Ireland as one of its top three countries. In early 1995, Ireland was selected as the preferred location. There were a number of important factors which governed our decision, tax incentives and employment grants being amongst the top. However, the availability of a suitably qualified and skilled workforce was the main factor that clinched our decision.

Today, almost five years later, we employ more than 2,000 people here in our site in Leixlip, Co Kildare. We're delighted with the quality of the education and competence of our outstanding employees. We've grown from a manufacturing business to a full technology campus, with a range of separate but connected HP businesses requiring a diverse range of people with different skills. The challenge for all business today is speed of change and, as leaders in the new e-business sector, we need to be ahead of that change.

Identifying the skills and qualifications that school students and college graduates need to grow e-business, now and in the future, is not an easy task. To succeed, we must ensure that our young people are well informed and empowered to make the correct career choices for jobs of tomorrow.

So who does this choosing? Who influences this choice? There are a number of people concerned in the decision-making process of young students when they make career choices: parents, peers, career teachers, TV role models. All have a measure of influence over the decisions made by the next generation of employees.

Parents often are unaware of how their perceptions and attitudes can and do affect their offspring. Many of us parents who grew up in the non-computer and technical age are wary of jobs we know little about. Coming from a background of high unemployment in Ireland, we tend to steer our children, sometimes unintentionally, into what we consider the safe jobs.

These are the professions that we believe are jobs for life, such as medicine, law and banking. Yes, there will always be jobs in these areas, though maybe not as many as we think and not always in the way they were or in the way we know them now.

The growth area in employment is in the new e-business, high-tech world. As parents, we owe it to our children to educate ourselves about the jobs in this brave new world, so that we can inform them of their options and allow them to select from a large range of employment opportunities.

I'm not suggesting that all graduates should be computer scientists or software developers. No, it's about opening our minds and theirs to all the opportunities, so that they don't end up as square pegs in round holes after years of study.

We are seeing a large increase in the dropout rate of students in their first year of college - often because courses are selected on the basis of highest CAO points attained at Leaving Certificate, rather than on understanding of the career chosen.

Another set of influencers well placed to help and lead young people to make the best choice are teachers and career guidance counsellors. I group them together because I believe that an inspiring teacher who is passionate about his or her own subject can be a real source of influence for young students. This is especially so where the subject is linked to real-life experience, such as the science subjects.

However, unfortunately, not all teachers or career guidance counsellors are inspirational, and as a parent whose children both struggled to make career choices, I was not impressed with too-little, too-late guidance I witnessed first hand. As a product of an inadequate service in the past, I was disappointed to realise that little had progressed in the intervening 20 years and more.

Need for an upgrade

There are, I believe, a number of reasons for this. The career guidance services are vastly under-resourced, with a ratio in some cases of one counsellor for up to 500 students. Up to quite recently, most counsellors did not have a computer or access to computer programmes with career-specific information. The development of career-related, tailor-made software is of paramount importance, as is the training of guidance counsellors who can direct their students into careers best suited to their talents and abilities.

This also requires that guidance counsellors source the latest education and training information available for students and establish links with industry.

Yes, Ireland does have a well-educated workforce and the Department of Education and Science is to be complimented on its proactive strategy to ensure Ireland is aware and responds to the needs of the labour market. Our universities and especially our institutes of technology are working closely with industry to ensure the relevance and availability of degrees and certificates for our future needs. But are our students being made aware of these developments?

Many companies are now looking to eastern Europe and Asia to find the skills required for this new e-business world. Will Ireland lose its competitive advantage and be left behind by countries once perceived as less developed than ourselves? It would be a great tragedy if, having attracted the top blue-chip technology companies into Ireland because of the availability of educated and suitably skilled workers, we were to discover that the skills needed and being offered in the marketplace were not the skills being acquired by our students.

A career-guidance service must be in touch with the labour market to ensure students are informed and assisted in making the correct choices for them. Career choice should not be a case of hit and miss; it should be the result of a well-informed decision based on the talents, interests and potential of each student.

Una Halligan is public affairs manager at Hewlett-Packard.