A new initiative is bringing the long-term unemployed back to the workplace and is helping to address the skills shortage in major high-technology companies. More than 75 jobs have already been created - most of them for women.
The initiative was devised by Tallaght Regional Technical College (RTC) which together with computer maker, Hewlett Packard, embarked on a pilot programme in October 1996 that led to 19 jobs for unemployed women aged between 30 and 50. The model is now being applied elsewhere.
During candidate selection for the first programme - a 13-week "Women in Electronics" course in Tallaght RTC - 25 of the 60 women interviewed were offered jobs directly in Hewlett-Packard without having to participate in training at all.
"Hewlett-Packard identified these people as perfectly suitable, even though they wouldn't have had the confidence to apply directly in the first place," says Ms Eileen Goold, a lecturer in electronics at Tallaght RTC, and director of the Women in Electronics programme.
The programme was put together as part of the EU's New Opportunities for Women (NOW) initiative, with the goal of encouraging women who have been unemployed for more than a year into the electronics industry.
To bring the programme to the attention of women in the home, 10,000 leaflets were sent to homes in the Leixlip-Maynooth area.
Hewlett-Packard part-funded the course during which its engineers addressed the students. The company also provided plant tours. Up to 50 per cent of training focused on personal development and confidence building, designed to prepare participants for their specific work environment.
The NOW project is due to end in December, but Hewlett Packard is continuing the recruitment model with Kildare Enterprise Board by sponsoring a seven-week course entitled "Skills Updating and Renewal Programme".
Based in community centres and schools in Newbridge and Kildare, the participants are selected from the long-term unemployed and women in the home. The intention is to recruit them as shift process operators at Hewlett Packard. The course has already signed up 40 people - 37 women and three men.
Ms Goold says: "These programmes show that the long-term unemployed do have a role, and they contribute an overall balance to workforces.
"Many computer companies have found that training people specifically for their workplace requirements has produced excellent results. They want new employees to be long-term investments and use the new programmes to familiarise candidates with the corporate culture from early on," she says.
As a result of the success of the NOW initiative, Tallaght RTC devised another 13-week training programme with Plunkett College and Dublin VEC. Out of 18 participants in the first electronic assembly skills course, 11 went on to jobs in Gateway, Motorola, Fujitsu and other leading technology companies. This course will continue indefinitely.
Motorola then became interested in starting a similar programme when it saw the quality of the candidates coming from these courses. In conjunction with Plunkett College, the company funded another course last March which led to employment for 16 of the 18 participants - 10 in Motorola and six in 3Com.
Participants in the programmes are generally employed as manufacturing team members with responsibility for quality, manufacturing and productivity in highly automated areas.
While these courses were initially designed to encourage women to enter an area previously dominated by men, they are increasingly targeting unemployed men also.
"This is a recruitment model that works, and we would certainly encourage the unemployed to open their minds to participating. Educational bodies should also tap into the unemployed as a valuable resource," says Ms Goold.
