Dell HQ in Dublin Dell HQ in Dublin
There are 716 jobs advertised by American IT giants in Ireland today. Before all you job seekers run out and sign up for the nearest programming course, you need to look at the skills that they are looking for. You hear that these multinationals only employ foreign sales people so DigitalTimes.ie examined the jobs in detail to dispel the myth and see what skills they are looking for.
It seems the employee most in demand is not a Java programmer but rather a Nordic language speaking customer support agent. How many of the thousands at the dole queues have these skills? It’s not all doom and gloom for the average Irishman with just the cúpla focal and pigeon French, in fact 72% of the 716 jobs only require you to speak English. Even in sales and customer support there are many jobs going for the UK and Ireland market. Having said that languages would give the jobseeker a distinct advantage with jobs advertised in all the main Latin, Germanic and Nordic languages as well as Russian, Turkish and Hebrew.
Irish IT sector multinational jobs by language required
The companies included were Google, Dell, Apple, Ebay/PayPal, Amazon, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Twitter, HP, Intel, IBM, Cisco and EA. Our survey categorised the jobs into eight areas: Sales, Marketing, Support and Operations, Engineering, Legal, Finance, HR and Other. The most popular department was Support and Operations with 264 jobs (37%), followed by Engineering with 178 (25%) and Sales with 158 (22%). The results varied from company to company, Apple and Ebay/PayPal are not looking for any engineers whereas Intel and Cisco are virtually exclusively hiring engineers.
Apple has the most jobs going, followed by Dell and Google. Google, Twitter and Apple are advertising roughly half English speaking roles and half foreign language roles. Ebay and Facebook are mostly looking for people with language skills whereas the firms with more engineering jobs like Intel and Cisco as well as Microsoft and EA do not require language skills.
Irish IT sector multinational jobs by department
So what skills is the multinational employer looking for? In short they are looking from all type of people – even lawyers. Despite some rumours there is engineering and design going on in the Irish offices and you don’t need to be fluent in Turkish and Hebrew to land a job, although it wouldn’t do you any harm!
