Graduates face difficult career decisions

By Kathleen Barrington

Now that they have finished their school and university exams, this year’s student graduates will have to consider where on earth they are going to find jobs at a time when unemployment is running at almost 15 per cent.

It is four years since this column pointed out that it would make financial sense for students sitting the Leaving Cert to consider a career in the public sector due to higher pay, better pensions and shorter working hours.

At that time, you could earn on average €47,000 a year in the public sector, compared with just €32,000 a year in industry.

You could also look forward to a pension pot that was typically worth about €1 million more than a private sector one.

It is still largely true that you stand to be better paid if you work in the public sector than in the private sector, judging by the CSO statistics published earlier this month.

They showed that average weekly earnings in the public sector amounted to €871.09, compared with €602.85 in the private sector.

But the backdrop against which students are making their career decisions has changed utterly since 2007.

There is an embargo on public sector recruitment, while public sector pay and pensions, which have already been cut, could be further slashed even if they currently remain more generous than private sector pay and pensions.

The harsh reality is that the public sector won’t be hiring en masse over the next few years, forcing a new generation of school and university-leavers to consider private sector solutions to their employment needs - whether that be at home or abroad.

A recent study by the international recruiting firm Manpower Group makes for interesting reading, as it shows where the job shortages are - both globally and domestically.

In a survey of 40,000 employers across 39 countries including Ireland, Manpower found one in three employers was experiencing difficulty filling positions ‘‘due to a lack of available talent’’.

It also said that employers were more likely to report difficulty this year than at any time since 2007.

The top jobs that global employers are having difficulty filling are technicians, sales representatives, skilled trades workers, engineers and labourers, according to the survey.

That’s followed by managers/executives, accounting and finance staff, information technology staff, production operators and secretaries.

Employers now find filling vacancies in Ireland easier than in all but one of the 39 countries surveyed.That won’t come as a surprise, given the sharp rise in unemployment over the last four years.

The relative ease with which employers can now fill vacancies means it is effectively an employers’ market, though the ready availability of labour should be helpful to the Industrial Development Authority in persuading foreign employers to locate here in the future.

But the Manpower survey also found there are still jobs which employers find relatively difficult to fill in Ireland. Top of the list are sales representatives, followed by engineers, secretaries, nurses, chefs and cooks.

The next most difficult positions to fill are drivers, skilled trade workers, managers, call centre operators and quality controllers.

In another pointer to job applicants, the three main reasons for having difficulty filling jobs are lack of experience, no applicants or lack of technical skills.

The lack of experience issue should be easily resolved by ambitious candidates if they gain work experience in their desired area during the holidays before presenting themselves for a formal interview.

Of course, many school and university-leavers will also want to take into account which jobs will likely pay them best.

However, the jobs for which there is most employer demand aren’t necessarily the best paid, judging by a salary survey published by Morgan McKinley this year.

The survey, which is available at www.morganmckinley.ie, shows that, despite the downturn in the financial services sector, jobs in accountancy and finance generally pay better than jobs in areas where employers are experiencing shortages, such as engineering.

For example, the top-paying job in information technology covered in the survey is a chief technology officer with more than five years’ experience. Someone in that position would expect to earn €125,000 a year. The next best-paying job in IT is a software development manager who, after five years, would expect to earn about €93,000.

By contrast, the top-paid finance director of a large company would expect to earn about €150,000 a year in Dublin, while a financial controller would expect to earn about €110,000 in Dublin.

The middle management jobs in financial services also appear to be better paid than middle ranking jobs in engineering, though comparisons between sectors are quite difficult as the job categories aren’t always strictly comparable.

At the bottom end of the scale, it seems that customer services staff with languages remain quite modestly paid even though employers say such jobs are hard to fill.

That suggests that candidates are either not particularly interested in the work or that they find the salaries unattractive.

One thing is clear though: this year’s crop of school-leavers and students need to study the jobs market carefully before making choices about their future careers.

They must consider where the vacancies are, what the pay and promotional opportunities are likely to be and how those match up against their own personal interests, knowledge, skills and ambitions.