We’re all part of the tech sector now. “I believe every job description should and will have AI in it,” says recruitment specialist Barry Prost, co-founder of the Propel Consult and Rent a Recruiter. His latest venture is a US-based partnership, Cove Recruitment, and he has just finished a stint as chair of the Dublin Regional Skills Forum.
To say Prost has his finger on the recruitment pulse is an understatement, and not just in Ireland. He recently co-hosted a HR Future of Work Conference in Bahrain.
In the home market, he is seeing demand across a range of sectors. “It’s still very hard to find people, and reports show the vast majority of Irish firms are finding it difficult to find the right skills, with unemployment at around 4.5 per cent,” he says.
Numerous tech-sector lay-offs were reported in 2025; these impacted mostly on sales and marketing, but general tech roles were affected too.
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On the other hand, demand for AI skills is growing, and indeed spilling over from the tech sector. “It’s very hard to talk about growth sectors without mentioning AI now. Indeed, one change we’re going to see is that almost all job descriptions are increasingly likely to have AI referenced in them,” says Prost.
Demand for cybersecurity and data engineering skills is up too, he points out, while demand for software engineering-type roles has softened.
“One of the things the large language models are doing is taking a lot of the heavy lifting away from coding.”
Paul Mannion of Green Fox Selection ascribes lay-offs in the tech sector less to the advent of AI than to continuing attempts by organisations to “right size” after having over-hired during the pandemic.
All of that said, sectors such as hospitality and retail are crying out for staff, says Mannion. Health sector skills are in demand too, with requirements not just for frontline staff but office workers in such areas as finance and procurement in the Health Service Executive. In some cases the HSE is offering contract positions, in the hope of converting people to permanent staff once they prove themselves, he says.
However, the problem facing laid-off tech workers is that they will struggle to match the kinds of salaries they enjoyed with US ICT firms. Mannion points to a recent case where a newly redundant HR person let go from an IT company was offered a comparable role in an indigenous company, but at a salary of about half the €100,000 she previously enjoyed.
“It puts such people in a very difficult situation going back to the market,” he says.
While the pharma sector remains a strong employer, with levels of pay comparable to IT, it requires a particular set of skills, and people who not only possess the technical chops but are also “quite analytical and detail oriented”.
Damien Owens, director general of Engineers Ireland, ascribes some of the shifts in the tech sector to “Amara’s Law”.
This states that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate its effect in the long run,” Owens explains. “A lot of companies over-hired during the pandemic, because everything went online, and there was an over-recruitment.
“The AI effect is sometimes used an excuse too, but not in all cases; yes, it’s certainly replacing some routine jobs but what is impacting the sector more is economic uncertainty and the tariff situation.”
He adds: “One thing any business hates – technology or otherwise – is uncertainty. It results in plans being put on hold. A lot of project management has been just suspended in mid-air, just waiting for more certainty, and that is impacting lay-offs too.”
Other elements of engineering are still moving full steam ahead, however, with enormous demand in sectors such as construction. As ever, this too has a technology angle, as Irish companies have become among the foremost data-centre builders in the world.
“Very many engineers in Ireland are working on overseas projects, and indeed that’s one of the good things about engineering: it’s such a mobile career. You don’t have to go away to work; you can work on projects overseas from here. The qualifications here are recognised globally, so whether it’s building chipmakers or pharma factories or data centres, Ireland has a lot of expertise now in that area, which we can leverage overseas.”
Back home, demand for home building is only going one way too – up. The use of modern methods of construction, which sees whole houses fabricated on a modular basis within a factory, ensuring they are erected in jig time on site, makes it a much more attractive industry for young people to go into, Owens points out.
Equally, demand is likely to stay strong for those with skills in the renewable energy sector, helped by government-mandated carbon reduction targets.
“We are also seeing demand for process engineers working in the biotech and pharma sectors, and medical devices is still strong too. People still need artificial hips,” Owens points out.
“Across all sectors of engineering there is now a global shortage of engineers. It has proven to be a very resilient career. Indeed, if you look at the last recession, when the construction sector collapsed, a lot of engineers in it redeployed to renewables and went from building houses to building wind farms.”
