In-company Training

Maintaining cost competitiveness is the key to Ireland's future economic progress.With current pressures in the economy, the retention of cost competitiveness requires renewed efforts to relieve excess demand pressure in the labour market while at the same time accelerating the pace of industrial adaptation.To date, efforts to increase labour supply have focused primarily on quantitative measures designed to raise the numbers in the labour force.These have included fiscal incentives, encouraging married women to enter or to return to employment, and easing restrictions on the entry of non-EU immigrants to the domestic labour market.These quantitative measures to raise the size of the potential labour force must now be reinforced by qualitative measures.An increase in the knowledge, skills and competence of those already at work would represent an addition to the effective labour supply since it would enhance the productive potential of the national workforce.By raising labour productivity, enterprise training can reduce the physical labour input per unit of output.Hence, enterprise training, defined as continuous vocational training for those at work, has an important role to play in easing the current tightness in labour markets.With this in mind, the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs considered that an examination of in-company training needs generally is timely.Apart from the fact that, increasingly, continuing education and training is an important determinant of future skills supply in all sectors of the economy, other considerations which the Expert Group had in mind were:• previous research has shown that an inadequate amount of training was being done in Irish industry generally and particularly in indigenous SMEs in traditional industries, and • it was not known how companies might now be changing their approach to training in response to labour market shortages.The report is based on and draws extensively from a study entitled In-Company Training commissioned by the Expert Group from McIver Consulting and Tansey, Webster, Stewart. Scope of the ReportThis report was prepared in parallel with a number of other studies, such as those being undertaken by IBEC and FÁS.To avoid duplication, the report focused on:• companies employing under 250 people, and • two sectors which are currently subject to particular changes that have a bearing on training needs: construction and traditional manufacturing.Furthermore, in order to complement the considerable survey work being done by other studies, the research was qualitative rather than quantitative.Through a series of in-depth interviews with some 40 companies, it sought to identify barriers to training so that appropriate policies to facilitate an increase in such training could be recommended.