The Knowledge Industry

Almost as soon as they touch ground - and they do that at the rate of one or two a week - prospective investors in electronics manufacturing are taken on a tour of educational and training facilities. Brian Trench on high -tech industry in Ireland.

The range of facilities has two things to recommend it to the in-coming companies: the educational and training services are adaptable to the demands of the new industries and they can all be coordinated in a month-by-month Training Plan, drawn up by AnCO and funded by the IDA. (It was not until an AnCO representative had concluded a fortnight's negotiations in Japan with Fujitsu that their project was announced.)

 

The mix of central co-ordination and short-term flexibility has been demonstrated forcibly. Through negotiations between the Manpower Consultative' Committee (MCC) and the Higher Education Authority (HEA), arrangements were made last year for third level institutions to increase by over 100 per cent their output of people qualified in electronics from 1979 to 1980. The package, which included plans for, increased output in many other industrially useful skills from vocational schools as well as third level colleges, took less than four months to get from the first MCC/HEA meeting to a political decision for "additional educational investment" of £1.725 million in May of last year. By October, enrolments had been made for about two thirds of the additional 1380 places. The intake under this crash programme is being further increased in the academic year just beginning.

 

For those who have been at the game a little longer it all came too late. One researcher remarks that it was the first occasion that the IDA and the HEA had ever talked to each other (through the Manpower Consultative Committee), although industrial development had for many years clear implications for third-level education. Another claims that he had spelled out the need for one-year conversion courses for scientists as long ago as 1974.

 

While the first generation of electronics industries required less than 15 per cent of their staff to be qualified as technicians or engineers, the proportion of highly skilled employees rises to over one third in the latest arrivals. The annual output of electronic technicians from third level colleges was estimated in a 1978 AnCO survey to be about 200, and the demand to be 250. More recent projections by the Manpower Consultative Committee foresee an even larger opening of the gap. The figures for those sitting this year's certificate and diploma examinations in electronics at RTCs and NIHE show what is in the circumstances only a marginal increase of 15 per cent on last year.

 

The problems are compounded by the fact that only one half of those who obtain these certificates (2-year course) and diplomas (3-year course) go into manufacturing industry. Nor is there any guarantee that the science graduates just finishing their conversion courses in rather lower numbers than hoped for last year will, in fact, take up industrial posts or, if they do, stay at home. The ESB can still outbid manufacturing industry for raw graduates. It seems security of employment and the prospect of a pension weigh strongly in the balance against the greater excitement - and risk - of work in industry. However, in the competitive world of the electronics industry, performance counts - and successful performance is well rewarded. There are examples of electronic technicians in their early 30s, earning £18,000 plus car, plus payments on a house.

The boom of the electronics industry, with all its implications education, has focussed attention on the relations between education and industry. On the slightest prompt, the Confederation of Irish Industry, the IDA, or AnCO will decry the negative

attitudes to industrial employment festered, they say - through the educational system. Dessie O'Malley, Industry Minister; considers it "strange that we should have five medical schools and six law schools while we have a shortage of qualified people in technical subjects." The forthcoming White Paper on Education -forthcoming for several years - will, says the govern men t, seek to ensure that second level curricula reflect "the impact of scientific and technological change on employment opportunities."

 

The rapid obsolescence of knowledge and the intense commercial competition give researchers in electronics, and particularly in micro-electronics, a very high profile and increasing proportion of the industries setting up in Ireland are devoting resources in those Irish subsidiaries to R & D. They are beginning to use the services made available in universities and NIHE. At the Limerick Institute, an Innovations Centre is being built, the Micro-processor Applications Centre has recently acquired a head and the appointment of a research professor in microprocessor engineering (with funding from the Westinghouse Corporation) is expected shortly. The Applied Research and Consultancy unit at Trinity College, Dublin, set up with IDA support, has been doing contract work for four years. The ESB has placed the bulk of contracts involving applications of micro-electronics, but now the newly arrived multi-nationals are showing an interest. At University College, Cork, the Micro-processor Research Centre, now being expanded on a £1.7 million HEA grant, has until recently had most of its contract work from abroad (mainly from the European Space Agency and from US Defence Forces in Europe) but is now working on four projects for Analog Devices in Limerick, which also has close research and training relations with NIHE.

 

Even from the point of view of researchers like Dr. Roy Johnston (Trinity College's industrial liaison officer) and Dr. Gerry Wrixon, director of the UCC Centre, both of whom favour closer industry links, there are risks in the operation. "Industry may come up with, projects which are too production:Oriented. They need to be innovative and add to the accumulated knowledge," says Gerry Wrixon. "Of course, 'we don't want the universities dominated by the military-industrial complex as has happened in the States," says Roy Johnston.

 

At NIHE, however, where the exchange between college and factory starts with "co-operative education" (two six-month placements) at the undergraduate level, such fears are rarely reflected. Director Dr. Edward Walsh wants to start the integration even earlier. He looks forward to primary teachers becoming "trouble-shooters", who work with students using computer terminals, and suggests "increasing the individual's problem-solving capacity through the administration of growth hormones to the foetus."

 

The meeting of academic research and industrial product development creates more physical than intellectual strains, however: the electronics industry lures the best brains from the colleges. Analog Devices have captured two senior lecturers from NIHE and two engineering lecturers from Trinity College have set up their own companies using micro-electronic equipment to make control systems and analytical equipment. AnCO, too, is affected by the electronics industry's powerful attraction: annual turnover of senior training advisers in the Engineering Division, which includes electronics, is about 50 per cent. The offers they can't refuse sometimes represent a doubling or trebling of salary. The traffic is not entirely one-way, however, as Ray Byrne, the division director, testifies personally. He went from science teaching to research in semi-conductors to electronics manufacturing and from there to AnCO, where he gets a "high level of job satisfaction".

 

The training laboratory for semiconductor fabrication to be located at University College, Dublin" and on which a government decision is expected shortly (the proposals have been with them for over six months), will need to offer plenty of that- and hard cash, as well -to find its staff. While the government decides the details on that, educational,industrial and manpower interests wi1l be meeting this month to decide how the foreseeable bottle-necks in the supply of technological skills can be avoided.

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