Technology Skills 2022: Ireland’s Third ICT Skills Action Plan sets out priority actions to meet Ireland’s needs for graduates skilled in computing and electronic and electrical engineering to support and drive economic performance over the coming years.

The Action Plan is a collaborative effort by Government, the education and training system and industry to meet Ireland’s high level ICT skills needs. Overall implementation  of the Plan is supervised  by a High-Level Steering Group chaired by the Department of Education and Skills, with senior representation from the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, and composed of representatives from government departments, national agencies, industry, education and training providers. 

The main target in the Plan is to  increase the total number of graduates with high-level ICT skills by more than 5,000 every year by 2022. Some of the measures to grow graduate numbers include:

  • Expanding the number of graduates from mainstream computing and electrical and electronic engineering courses in higher education from 4,220 to 4,830 by 2022.
  • Expanding the numbers of relevant programmes by Skillnet Ireland (the National Agency for Workforce Learning), which are aligned with the NQF (the Irish National Qualification Framework) by more than 1,000 by 2022.
  • Attracting more women towards potential career development in digital and emerging technologies. 
  • Providing new options to embed high-level ICT apprenticeships within the education and training sector to attract more than 1,000 new applicants per year by 2020.
  • A high-level ICT reskilling pathway to provide opportunities for up to 2,750 people from diverse backgrounds between 2019 and 2022.

Training programmes target areas of high demand and high potential growth, including Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Animation, Gaming, Blockchain, Internet of Things, 3D Printing, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Cybersecurity/Next Generation Security.

Strategy Details

Budget

Funding for the Action Plan is allocated from the resources available to the Department of Education and Skills, which includes the National Training Fund and the Human Capital Initiative from 2020.

Digital skill level
Advanced
Digital expert
Digital technology / specialisation
Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity
Internet of Things
Big Data
Blockchain
Robotics
Augmented Reality
Virtual Reality
Geographic scope
Ireland
Organization
Strategy state-of-play

The action plan was accepted in 2020, currently a lot of initiatives and projects are developed to implement the strategy.

Target audience
Digital skills for the labour force.
Digital skills for ICT professionals and other digital experts.
Digital skills in education.
Target language
English
Timeline/roadmap
Adoption - 2019.. Actions for period 2020-2022.
Stakeholders

Overall implementation of this Plan will be driven by a High-Level Steering Group, co-chaired by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) and Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI), and composed of representatives from Government Departments, Agencies, Industry and Education and Training Providers. The membership of this Group will ensure that the strategic priorities in this plan are not delivered in isolation from recent initiatives in Ireland’s National Skills Strategy 2025.

Type of initiative
National initiative