Springboard for job-hunters looking to the cloud for inspiration

THE SUN beat down on the National College of Ireland’s Dublin campus on Wednesday, but inside more than a hundred people had their heads in the cloud.

“Hands up who here is job-hunting or expects to be job-hunting in the next six months,” careers expert Rowan Manahan asks the attendees at the college’s free cloud computing seminar.

Almost all of the hands shoot up.

So why are they here? Because their jobs in construction, financial services, accountancy, healthcare, education and elsewhere have evaporated and they are now turning to “the cloud” to find new qualifications and, eventually, employment.

“It [cloud computing] is a bit of a buzzword at the moment, but it has real relevance,” Michael Bradford from the college’s school of computing attempts to assure the crowd: “Major corporations are pumping money into it.”

The “Find Your Silver Lining” seminar was designed as a sampler for the college’s range of certificates and diplomas in web development, web technologies and cloud computing.

The courses are being offered under the Higher Education Authority’s Springboard programme, which is providing free training places to up to 6,000 unemployed people seeking to reskill.

There was advice on both self-employment and employment in the wake of Ireland’s cloud buzz.

Representing the entrepreneurial side of affairs, Joe Haugh, a former IBM employee who founded product registration service ProductFul.com, notes the benefit of lean costs for small businesses working off a cloud infrastructure.

“Entry costs are pretty minimal,” Haugh says. “I don’t have a server, I don’t have any licensee costs. I don’t have to pay for additional hardware.”

In the meantime, it pays not to be profile-shy.

Jackie Flatley, Irish HR manager at multinational Citrix – which employs 150 people in cloud computing tech support in Dublin – tells attendees that 80 per cent of the people recruited to the company were found through LinkedIn.

Dermot Casey, chief operating officer at Mark Little’s news site venture Storyful – “I do everything but the journalism” – says it raises “a red flag” with him when job candidates have no online profile.

Both Citrix and Storyful are hiring, they add, but some of the job titles, such as “content strategist” at Citrix’s Knowledge Centre, seem a little hazy to an audience not yet accustomed to ICT-speak.