All about adding value
June 1, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
future worker bees
I did an interesting interview with Libby Gribben, international human resources director with US chip design firm Xilinx, for last Sunday’s recruitment page of the Sunday Business Post.
Xilinx has been in Ireland since 1995, growing to 450 workers by 2005, but since shrinking to 130 as the company re-organised its global operations, leaving high level R&D and sales support jobs in Ireland and moving the rest elsewhere.
‘‘India is our engineering and software development hub,” said Gribben. ‘‘We have centralised our operations and logistics function in Singapore, close to our manufacturing. We need to be near our customers across the globe, so we have the Irish operation covering Europe, Middle East and Asia. It is not that each region carries out the same role – and is therefore in competition with each other – but more that each region has a value of its own. Over 80 per cent of our staff in Ireland would be educated to third level and above.”
We didn’t really have time to get into whether it was better for Ireland as a whole for multinationals with Irish operations to have 450 jobs spread across different specialities and levels or 130 high value ‘knowledge economy’ jobs. It’s a moot point anyways I guess.
Full article, including comment from Gribben about the HR challenges of going through a restructuring process, how Ireland is fixed for attracting high value jobs and the technology being developed by Xilinx in Ireland, is through here though on thepost.ie, if you want a read.
