Concern over labour dispute exclusion in bill
February 18, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
scales, balance, et cetera
I don’t normally get involved in the process of making and debating new legislation going through the Dail, but last week I did. Kinda anyway.
A piece I wrote on labour disputes for the SBP earlier this year, lead to Pat Brady, honourary secretary of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb), getting in touch to raise concerns about why labour disputes were specifically excluded from new arbitration legislation currently going through the Dail.
This did seem a bit counter-intuitive to me, so we did a bit of looking around, I spoke to Labour senator Ivana Bacik who was putting a question to the minister in the Seanad, and ended up with a piece for last Sunday’s SBP recruitment page.
‘‘The concern is that the exclusion from the 1954 act has just been repeated in the new act, without examining it in detail,” Bacik said. ‘‘It would be good to look at it again and see if there would be support from unions and employers to have arbitration extended to labour disputes.”
The full article is through here on the SBP website. More about the bill itself, with each of its various stages outlined, is through here on the pretty comprehensive oireachtas.ie site.
Getting smart
February 10, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
Computers in Business
Last weekend’s Computers in Business magazine (which comes monthly with the Sunday Business Post) featured a multi-page feature I put together on the ’smart’ skills that Irish businesses need to compete in the knowledge economy going forward.
The intro to the feature lead with news from an IDC research report published last December argued that European organisations must invest in training their staff in emerging ‘smart’ IT technologies:
The study, entitled Post Crisis: e-Skills are Needed to Drive Europe’s Innovation Society and commissioned by Microsoft, investigated whether workers would need ICT skills to participate in the job market. It found that, within five years, 90 per cent of all jobs – across all industry sectors and EU countries – would require up to date ICT skills, as companies required staff to make use of technology in their day-to-day job roles.
The research, which surveyed 1,370 employers across 13 EU countries, found that the increased demand for ICT skillsets was not solely a response to the current economic crisis. Instead, long-term technology change, with the introduction of new smart technologies and the evolution towards a more knowledge-based economy, would be a stronger influence on training and hiring policies.
The rest of the feature included a ‘top 5 smart skills‘ panel, and interviews with a couple of different IT professionals about the importance of training for their IT careers.
The full feature is available on the thepost.ie website. Also, if you’re interested, CiB itself has a shiny and relatively new website, with info on previous and forthcoming mags.
Giving something back
February 2, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
minister o'cuiv with kids and skeleton
Last Sunday’s Business Post ran an interview I did with Della Clancy from business and children connecting NGO Junior Achievement Ireland about their ‘Enterprise Challenge’ programme, which encourages young people from poorer backgrounds to stay in school so they can go on to have a career in business or other areas.
‘‘People from inner city Dublin are very seriously underrepresented in third level education,” said Della Clancy, executive director, Junior Achievement Ireland. ‘‘Many of them don’t do the Leaving Cert, and there is no tradition of them going on to third level. If you are not conditioned in your home and community, it is quite difficult to do it.
‘‘The whole idea is to bring them into the college, which is near where they live and go to school, and show them that it is a friendly, interesting and exciting place. They had lots of fun around the labs in DIT, and we had some workshops in the college as well. The children were made to feel welcome and told about the different supports that are there to help them go on to third level.”
The full piece is through here on the SBP site.
For more info on Junior Achievement head over to their website here – www.juniorachievement.ie.
How to get the best out of staff
January 27, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
sitting comfortably
One of the things I miss out on as a freelancer is an annual performance appraisal from the boss. So it was interesting to do a feature on appraisals for last Sunday’s Business Post.
I spoke with Stephanie Duffy, business improvement manager with Russell Brennan Keane, Louise Campbell, managing director, Robert Walters Ireland and Joe Ungemah, managing consultant with SHL Ireland, to get an idea of the latest thinking around how to conduct such reviews, especially with the downturn and all.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the words ‘change’ and ‘productivity’ popped up more regularly in the interviews than the words ‘fat automatic salary bump’. Still, the main gist of the piece was that regular appraisals were beneficial for both employer and employee:
‘In difficult market conditions, appraisals are often put on the back burner, while employees concentrate on holding on to their job, and employers are too busy with business-critical matters,” said Campbell. ‘‘This is understandable, but a mistake. An appraisal is a great platform to set out clear benchmarks that people need to achieve to improve their productivity and move to the next level of their career.”
The full feature is through here on thepost.ie website.
Q. Who wants to work for Nama? A. Lots of people.
Help wanted
I had a – pretty interesting and timely I reckons – story in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post about the type of jobs that will be created within the agency while it tries to sort out the property / banking mess in Ireland, and what types of people might be interested in helping out.
The answer, it seems, is a good few jobs (at least 75 positions) and lots of interested people (2,500 unsolicited CVs before recruitment even begun).
Here’s a couple of the choice quotes from the article:
‘‘Since Nama was conceived there has been massive interest and a high level of enquiry – particularly among senior candidates,” said Shay Dalton, managing director of the Lincoln Group. ‘‘All you have to do is look at the level of applications that Nama has received directly to judge the level of interest.”
‘‘A significant number of jobseekers we have spoken to have applied directly, with experience levels varying from those recently qualified to very senior individuals,” said David Byrnes, manager of accountancy practice, legal and international with Brightwater. ‘‘The indications are that Nama is looking to recruit seasoned professionals with significant experience in their field. There will be a definite focus on professionals with an objective perspective across the main market players.”
Also interesting to learn was that each of the participating banks has put together ‘Nama teams’ to liaise with the agency / present themselves well / get good deals, so there are also specialist valuation, legal and asset management jobs going there, despite trumpeted recruitment freezes.
For more about all this click through here to the SBP’s site for the full article.
More good green jobs news
January 18, 2010 by dermot · Leave a Comment
I had a ‘done deal’ story in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, focusing on an investment of €920,000 from the 2008 Davy BES Fund in Cork company McGill Environmental Systems (Ireland).
McGill’s chairman Noel Lyons said the planned expansion, which will create 15 high-skill jobs, made sense given the massive scarcity of similar facilities in Ireland at present.
‘‘Environmental regulations are the ultimate driver of our business. To comply with EU regulations, several hundred thousand tonnes of organic waste a year must be recycled in Ireland. The up and running capacity at the moment is a fraction of what will be required,” he said.
You can click through here for the full story on the SBP website.
New system proposed for labour disputes
First post here for 2010 points to the last article I had in the Sunday Business Post in 2009. It was a feature on a recent proposal by the Labour Relations Commission to introduce a new formally binding voluntary arbitration procedure to better and faster resolve industrial relations disputes in Ireland.
‘‘In the current changed business environment, in both public and private sectors, we cannot hang around now for forever circling negotiations in ever increasing fora,” the LRC’s chief executive Kieran Mulvey said. ‘‘I would suggest that, where the partners agree that they have been negotiating for a long time, and are evidently not going to get an agreement, there could be an option of an arbitration that they would both have to accept. It would fast-track what has been a long series of negotiations to a successful conclusion.”
The feature included generally favourable comments on the proposal from Ibec director Brendan McGinty, Liam Berney, industrial officer at ICTU and Melanie Crowley, partner at Mason Hayes & Curran Solicitors. You can read it on the Sunday Business Post website by clicking here.
Private viewing
December 22, 2009 by dermot · Leave a Comment
I’m more than very happy to have another story in this month’s When Saturday Comes, which is one of the best, if not the best, football periodicals around.
The article is a look at Kill the Referee, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the refs and reffing at the Euro 2008 football tournament. I saw the doc at the Seville European Film Festival last month, and spoke with its Belgian director Yves Hinant about the work:
“I am not a sports journalist and do not care about football,” Hinant told me. “I make films about real life. For me UEFA was like a huge company and football is like any other work. The referees are ordinary employees who have to follow the rules while under a lot of pressure.”
So the film does not features many goals or pieces of skill, instead focusing on the refs decisions, pressures, controversies, personal rivalries etc. It’s pretty interesting and is a nice antidote to the recent brouhaha about controversial refereeing decisions. I’d tell you even more about Kill the Referee, but really you should buy a copy of the mag to find out.
It’s available from most good newsagents in Ireland and the UK, or indeed online at the wsc.co.uk website shop. Enjoy.
Harnessing Generation Y’s potential
December 21, 2009 by dermot · Leave a Comment
A feature I’d been working on for a couple of weeks appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post recruitment section, which looked at how companies can best attract and motivate staff under 30 – known as either ‘millenials’ or ‘Generation Y’.
It came out of recent research by PwC entitled Managing Tomorrow’s People, and included a chat with Mark Carter, a partner with PwC Ireland human resources services:
‘‘Generational categorisations can be risky at times, but the surveys suggest that the millenial generation people are somewhat different. They have high expectations of what employers will do for them, as opposed to what they can do for their employer. That doesn’t mean they do not want to work hard, but they want to work in a different way,” said Carter.
I also spoke with Sandra McDevitt, head of people operations for Google in Ireland and Fiona Mullen, head of HR at Microsoft Ireland, for the piece.
‘‘It can sound a bit wacky, but we look to recruit people who are ‘Googley’,” said McDevitt. “The big thing for us is – can these people work collaboratively in a very fast-paced, rapidly changing workplace environment and who have the smarts to solve problems creatively?”
‘‘Unpaid leave of absence can be very important for our younger employees, so that they can go and gain some other experiences, such as travelling abroad,” said Mullen. “We also offer three-day volunteering opportunities to all of our employees, which are very highly valued by our graduate population.”
More thinking outside the box in the full piece through here on the SBP site.
Winter motoring
December 21, 2009 by dermot · Leave a Comment
I had a couple of pieces in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post ‘Winter Motoring’ supplement. The first was a look at how manufacturers have reacted to the new €1,500 ’scrappage scheme’ introduced by the Irish government in the recent budget. Here’s a hint:
“Manufacturers are putting together offers that are worth significantly more than the €1,500,” said Alan Nolan, director general of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (Simi). ‘‘The manufacturers are out there competing for what will be an exciting market in January. So there is no doubt consumers will benefit in a competitive market.”
The full copy, which also includes details of exactly how the scheme will work, and the super-severe challenges faced by the Irish motor industry at the moment, is through here on the SBP site.
The other piece was a look at the latest in in-car sat-nav technology, based around a new deal between Microsoft and Navteq, and offering advice to people considering buying a GPS system as a Christmas present this holiday season:
“(P)eople should look out for features which help make the journey easier – for example, 3D graphics or visuals, which can help a driver navigate complex junctions on motorways,” said Cliff Fox, executive vice president, Navteq Maps. ‘‘Connectivity available through some portable devices provides online access to real time data such as traffic information, fuel prices at nearby petrol stations or even movie listings or car park availability.”
The rest of the piece is through here on the thepost.ie website.