We Need an IT Talent Strategy for Ireland's Smart Economy

The ‘Smart Economy’ is at the core of the government’s strategy for Ireland’s economic recovery and for our long term growth. A key element of this strategy is to invest heavily in research and development and incentivise multi-nationals to locate more R&D capacity in Ireland. A workforce with the right skills and in sufficient quantity are key to achieving this. Indeed the government’s paper ‘Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economical Renewal’ recognises this and states that ‘A key feature of this approach is building the innovation or ‘ideas’ component of the economy through the utilisation of human capital – the knowledge, skills and creativity of people - and its ability and effectiveness in translating ideas into valuable processes, products and services.’.

What then are the skills that will be key to incentivising multinationals to locate more R&D here? A recent report by Deloitte and CIO – ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ provides some valuable insights in to the type of IT Skills that are required by multi-nationals and in particular those that are in short supply. The report highlights the fact that for many organisations a lack of IT skills was hampering their ability to innovate and was having a material impact on their key measures of success including quality, time to market, customer relationships and growth. The IT skills that they cited as being in particular shortage were of a strategic nature and included Enterprise Architects, IT Architects, Risk managers and project managers. These were also seen as key roles that had a disproportionately high impact on the organisations’ overall performance as well as representing the key leadership required during good and bad economic times.

Ireland has an opportunity to differentiate itself from the competition for the R&D dollars of multi-nationals by ensuring that we can fill this IT talent gap. After all, what better incentive can we offer than to show multi-nationals that we have a ready supply of strategic IT talent that will have a disproportionally positive impact on their company’s performance?

The report authors call for companies to develop an IT Talent Strategy. Ireland Inc. needs to do the same in order to make sure that we are a part of these talent strategies. The Smart economy depends on it.

The full report ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ can be found here.