A large number of job vacancies in the Irish IT sector will be filled by graduates from abroad as the number applying to study related subjects in Ireland is still failing to meet the demands of the sector.
The claim comes as a survey carried out by Dublin City University recorded an increase of 42% in IT jobs advertised on the Internet in Ireland this year.
While a shift in job advertising from newspapers to the Internet may be a factor in this recorded growth, when the figures are adjusted to reflect the jobs actually available in the market, the growth corresponds to 11,000 job vacancies in the sector, up from over 8,000 a year ago.
Concerns have been raised that not enough students are showing an interest in IT-related third level courses.
DCU Professor Michael Ryan said: "Somehow students are not getting the picture. They seem stuck on the dot com fiasco, now ancient history in this business. They should be looking at the future, where everything from entertainment to medical care to management will involve computers and software.
"The opportunities are vast. People with imagination and an entrepreneurial spirit who understand the technology are going to do extremely well," he concluded.
The Government's Expert Skills Group is thought to have largely underestimated the likely demand for gratuates in the sector in the year 2010.
The group predicted a shortfall of between 1,217 and 2,313 in the supply of graduates in 2010, when the current crop of college entrants will be graduating.
However, industry sources expect this gap to be significantly greater than predicted and the Government has already undertaken to develop recruitment programmes to attract IT graduates from abroad.
"Part of the turn away from computing courses is due to a lack of understanding of what is involved...when it comes to computing, we have seen nothing yet," concluded Professor Ryan.
