Dr Keith Sunderland

Good morning, David.

How are you keeping?

Well, I suppose we are facing a critical skills shortage, but unfortunately, that's nothing new, David.

All disciplines in engineering are identified as having issues, as been reported by the Department of Enterprise on its critical skills occupation lists, as has been reported by SOLAS across the range of different disciplines, and particularly in construction.

As we see it, there are two major challenges that we're facing.

One, the dearth of necessary infrastructure requiring skills across the spectrum.

And then we're also faced with the age of digitization,

tools and artificial technology requiring upskilling in an increasingly globalised and mobile economy.

So what we're hearing from engineers is that there are deficits at all levels.

We publish a barometer which gives a comprehensive snapshot of the engineering profession in Ireland and engineering employers as part of that barometer survey have indicated that, half of them by the way, have indicated that it takes up to six months to fill some vacancies in this sector.

So that's, again, that's from almost half of the respondents.

So it is an acute issue in our economy.

Well, we are, like, ultimately, it's a pipeline issue.

It's not just an immediate reaction.

It can't be knee-jerk.

It needs to, obviously, we need an injection quickly.

quickly to basically fill that pipeline, but it also needs to be filled at the earlier stages as well.

Ultimately, we have three and a half thousand grads in Irish education in level eight engineering programs, but we need in the next decade demand for up to 22,000 engineers.

So we have an issue, but that issue doesn't start at third level.

It actually starts in second level and even primary.