asked the Minister for Labour the proposals he has to meet the demand for skilled technological workers to service the various industries in the coming year.
Written Answers. - Technological Workers.
348.
The National Manpower Service are currently contacting employers, including those who notified them of vacancies for skilled technological personnel last year. When this exercise has been completed the service will assess whether the level of demand is sufficient to justify another recruitment campaign abroad and will consult with AnCO and the IDA, to determine the key worker occupations to attract the special resettlement grants and allowances which were a feature of the successful 1979 campaign.
The Manpower Consultative Committee have already recommended a further recruitment campaign abroad to be undertaken in the autumn subject to the vacancies being notified in sufficient numbers to the National Manpower Service before that date. The campaign abroad will be supplemented this year by an advertising campaign at Irish ports directed at skilled workers coming here as tourists.
Of course, the supply of skilled technological workers will also be enhanced by the increase effected in the output from third level education resulting from the Manpower Education Programme launched last year. Altogether the programme is expected to give rise to an output of nearly 350 highly qualified technical workers this year. Over 200 of these will be from the special post-graduate courses introduced for the first time last year with a view to conferring relevant skills and knowledge in the short supply occupations on graduates or diploma holders from appropriate related courses.
At the same time AnCO are continuing to promote apprentice opportunities in both private and public sector employments. The present level of apprentices registered with AnCO totals 19,300 and represents an increase of nearly 3,000 in the past two years. In the coming year many of the skilled crafts will benefit from a two-year output as apprentices who followed the old five-year apprentice system and those following the new four-year system introduced in 1976 complete their final years.
In the last year AnCO enouraged employers to take on toolmaker and fitter apprentices over and above their own needs to provide for new industrial development by using any spare capacity to take one or two extra apprentices or by the development of in-company training programmes for larger numbers of extra apprentices. AnCO will support the full cost of training these apprentices in the first year and 50 per cent in the second year and the IDA are also providing capital grants for in-company training facilities in specific cases. Lapple Ireland Ltd. of Carlow who have developed a school for toolmaking apprentices are the first firm to benefit from this.