‘New-collar jobs’: looking beyond traditional hiring criteria

After years of growth, accelerated during Covid, the tech sector became almost synonymous with good jobs and great conditions, from free food to at-desk massage. It’s why lay-offs in the tech sector came as such as shock last year and still are.

By March about 2,300 jobs were estimated to have been lost in the sector here, with predictions for another 3,000 additional job losses across the sector to come.

“The tech sector is taking its foot off the pedal, with reductions taking place,” says Ed Rossiter, of Phoenix Recruitment, which has offices in Ireland, the UK and US.

“However the big move we are seeing is to contracted head count.” He noted that permanent recruitment is down but relationships with third-party contractors remain.

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In many cases third-party contractors will continue to access the same buildings but typically “don’t get access to the same benefits” as full-time employees, he points out.

If the move to contracted head count helps take the sting out a little, so too should the fact that the number of job losses is relatively small.

Employment growth

According to a report into the ICT sector by the Central Bank, published in March, employment in the sector increased to 164,600 in Q4 2022, up 29.2 per cent compared to the end of 2019.

It represented the fastest pace of employment growth across all sectors over this period. Detailed CSO data show that much of this increase in employment was in the high-skilled computer programming sub-sector, with growth in occupations such as software developers and system analysts.

Given the tightness of the labour market here, however, with record numbers at work, increased availability of talent with highly transferrable digital skills will have been music to the ears of the indigenous small and medium-sized businesses sector. It has been crying out for tech talent for years and lamenting its ability to compete with the kind of perks and conditions that major multinationals can offer.

Indeed, in line with Government policy to digitalise businesses of all kinds, demand for Stem [science, technology, engineering and math] skills of all kinds will only grow. Other growing sectors, such as life sciences and financial services, will be keen to soak up ICT [information and communication technologies] talent too.

Beyond traditional talent

The tightness of the labour market is one of the reasons why perhaps the most radical trend to emerge in recent years among US MNCs [multinational corporations] has been its desire to look beyond traditional talent pools.

A report from Gartner, a US tech research firm, reckons the pursuit of non-traditional candidates is now one of the top trends among US firms.

This is because “employees are charting nonlinear career paths,” it says. Some 56 per cent of candidates surveyed report applying for jobs outside their current area of expertise, and Gartner predicts this figure will climb further in the coming years.

Moreover, “organisations can no longer meet their talent needs through traditional sourcing methods and candidate pools. Plus, hiring managers are less concerned with industry experience and technical skills than they once were,” it says.

Increasingly, to fill critical roles, organisations “will need to become more comfortable assessing candidates solely on their ability to perform in the role, not their credentials and prior experience,” it says, adding that it’s now “more urgent than ever to rethink outdated assumptions about qualifications”.

In the US companies such as Google and IBM have already reduced the educational qualifications for some roles, focusing more on the skills and experience required to actually do the job.

New collar jobs

IBM has pioneered this shift away from degree requirements, with less than one-third of its US job adverts for IT roles requiring a degree. It coined the term “new-collar jobs” to refer to the proliferating number of careers that don’t necessarily require a traditional degree but rather a specific set of in-demand skills.

It has gone further, developing alternative routes into the workplace, including apprenticeship programmes that provide on-the-job training in areas from blockchain to cybersecurity.

Here in Ireland US financial services company Fidelity, which employs 1,300 people at its offices in Dublin and Galway, 1,000 of them technologists, is walking this talk.

As well as investing significantly in lifelong learning among its employees, it believes traditional graduate pipelines are not sufficient to meet industry needs and is now actively engaged in creating alternative pathways, including technology apprenticeship programmes.