About 50,000 more digital skills specialists will be required in the Irish workforce by the year 2030, but the current system for producing them is incapable of meeting the demand, a report from the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs said.
The report said there were about 168,800 people employed in areas such as cybersecurity, software engineering and data analytics last year, but puts its more conservative estimate of the number needed in four years at 215,400, a gap of 46,600.
Given current capacity constraints, it suggested there would be a shortfall in the number of skilled workers of between 5,500 and 7,700 a year over the term of the projection.
To address this, it said, there must be a substantial expansion of education and training capacity, greater collaboration between educational establishments and employers, and improved opportunities for workplace training and upskilling.
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Minister for Enterprise and Employment Peter Burke said: “The report confirms that demand for digital specialists will continue to grow strongly across all sectors and that advanced capabilities in areas such as AI, cybersecurity, software engineering and data will be increasingly important.”
The findings indicated that the fastest growing area of demand was for cybersecurity specialists due to a mix of the increasing risk of cyberattacks, regulatory requirements and other factors.
Separately, the latest Morgan McKinley Global AI report suggested that only one in four employees believed their employer was properly supporting their development of artificial intelligence-related skills. About 30 per cent said they were planning to improve those skills using their own resources.
The report, compiled using a survey of 1,900 employees and 150 employers across seven international markets including Ireland, found that 48 per cent of employees used personal AI accounts for work purposes.
Almost half of employees believed AI could take their jobs. But just 7 per cent of employers said they had cut numbers as a result of the technology while 13 per cent said it had caused planned recruitment to be paused or delayed.
More than half of employers said greater data literacy, analytic capabilities, ability to use AI tools and prompt engineering were regarded as priority skills.
Complete distrust of AI was put at 35 per cent in Ireland compared to 27 per cent in the United Kingdom and just 9 per cent in Japan and Hong Kong.
Commenting on the pace of AI integration into workplaces, Morgan McKinley head of research Trayc Keevans said “the next phase of adoption will depend on whether organisations can turn that individual initiative into workforce capability, supported by meaningful training and governance that employees understand and can apply”.
In another report, called Shared Prosperity, employers’ group Ibec found European-owned firms here now employed about 280,000 people, or almost 10 per cent of the workforce, and invested €4.5 billion annually in infrastructural upgrades.
“Across every region of Ireland, European enterprises from across the continent are actively driving green transformation, delivering essential infrastructure, conducting high-value research and supporting local supply chains,” said Fergal O’Brien, Ibec’s executive director of policy, lobbying and global affairs.
