The Tech Talent Visa Campaign – Winning the War for Talent
The Tech Talent Visa Campaign: 1.4 Million Jobs by 2016.
We can make Ireland the land of opportunity for 21st century skilled labour.
We need to reach out to anybody with knowledge skills and set Ireland as the place where they can achieve their dreams. Approaching the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the State, let’s create a Tech Talent Visa, which sends out the message that Ireland welcomes with open arms those people with the technical and scientific skills we will need to realise Ireland’s aspiration to be the Silicon Valley of Europe.
Ireland should issue 50,000 visas a year for the next four years, ensuring 200,000 knowledge jobs and supporting another 1.2 million in the domestic economy – thus creating and securing over 1.4 million jobs by 2016.
So how do we go about doing this?
Knowledge Workers are specialists. It takes years of relevant training to develop these skills. Ireland simply doesn’t have enough people in relevant courses now to supply the skilled workforce we will require. Even if all the 3rd level graduates specialised in knowledge-based disciplines, we still wouldn’t have enough people to feed the demands of the science and technology industries. So ‘grow your own’ is not an option.
The Race for Talent
The race is on globally to find and attract the talent that will power the next economy. We are competing with the UK, the US, China, Singapore (the list goes on) for the top talent in science and technology. The countries that win this talent war will lead the world economy in the 21st century.
The creation of a Tech Talent Visa programme will at once send a message to the world that Ireland is the place to be if you are a knowledge professional.
It will show that Ireland is intent on building on its existing success, sending a positive message out to future employers – that Ireland ‘gets it’, that Ireland is innovating to solve the biggest challenge globally: Talent.
Drucker knew this back in 2003:
“We need an economic policy that accepts that 90 percent of workers in a developed economy are not manual workers. We need to think through our national policy to tilt to the new realities in which capital is totally mobile and available any place at the same price. Today the only differentiator is the productivity of the human resource…and we will have to develop quite new and totally different thinking.”
Peter Drucker, The Future of the Corporation IV, lecture given at Claremont Graduate University, 2003
If Ireland is to achieve the current government’s stated goal of being “the best small country to do business in by 2016”, the recruitment drive must start now.
I am excited by the Open Ireland idea. It would seem that the time is right for this. Lots of empty houses; great network effects as hubs are starting to emerge here in games, social media, etc. But obviously there’s a combination of other factors that are required to make it happen. Getting the message out there that we are open for taking people in is one thing (government willing); we also need to show entrepreneurs that we have the things that will make them and their families happy – schools (quality of teaching, Edu Together, etc.), parks, broadband – plus streamlining the processes required for tax, health, employment for their new businesses. Surely we can change the rules to allow these entrepreneurs easier access to Ireland. I loved the story of the people in Silicon Valley who were trying to get around the visa issue for foreign entrepreneurs by having a cruise liner off the California cost that would be able to chopper people in and out for meetings – hopefully we don’t have to do that!
If I look at DERI (a computing research institute at NUI Galway, with some 30+ countries represented in its 130+ person team), some of our skilled people have left after finishing their PhDs even though they may have wanted to stay (due to visa restrictions). It doesn’t seem right. But we have been fortunate to keep some good people too. The three startups that emerged from DERI this past year were set up by French, Italian and Romanian researchers from the Institute (Seevl: music discovery; Sindice Tech: semantic search; Peracton: financial markets) – of course, less visa issues since they are European. One idea would be for the big research institutes to lobby the Government to allow non-EU researchers to remain here post-graduation.
Funding schemes like SFI and IRCSET (for PhD researchers) often fund non-EU researchers. I currently have both an EU student (Privatezza) and a US researcher (SocialFitPhD) under the IRCSET enterprise partnership scheme. One can certainly stay here after his studies, the other probably can’t as easily – but surely we should be encouraging all of them to stay on afterwards.
Very happy to support this initiative.
John.
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P.S. At New Tech Post for the past two years, we’ve been interleaving stories about Ireland and our tech visionaries with internationally-relevant emerging tech articles to try and get the good news about Ireland out there.