home
login
contact
about
Finance Dublin
Finance Jobs
 
Friday, 29th March 2024
    Home             Archive             Publications             Our Services             Finance Jobs             Events             Surveys & Awards             
Education is key to the next stage of development of the IFSC Back  
A proposal developed by the IDA and the National College of Ireland to establish a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in the heart of Dublin’s IFSC, is aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of the financial sector in Ireland says Brendan Logue, and maintaining its growth by consolidating Dublin’s competence as a financial centre in areas like hedge funds, alternative risk management, securitisation and intellectual property management.
It would be stating the obvious to say that financial services is an activity heavily dependent on the intellectual skills of its management and workforce. This is evident when one considers that the majority of those who work in the IFSC, even at relatively junior level, are graduates - many with additional professional qualifications. It is therefore somewhat puzzling that in contrast to the other vital components of the sector e.g. taxation, regulation, physical facilities etc that the people/skills issue still does not benefit from any formal structure to enhance the quantity, quality and functioning of the skills resource for the sector.
It would also be stating the obvious to say (viewed from an overall sector point of view) that considerable efficiencies and cost reductions could be gained from enhancing the functioning of people/skills issues. For example direct and indirect costs associated with staff turnover in the largest sectors possibly amounts to as much as 10 per cent of labour cost. Much of this overhead could be attributed to the cost of recruiting replacements, formal training (external and internal) and the early downtime of new recruits. The secondary effects of theses inefficiencies in terms of additional supervisory requirements, errors in accounting etc. also create a considerable cost burden.
In looking to the future it needs to be acknowledged that if Dublin is to continue to gain market share in the international arena that we cannot be content with a status quo on the skills issue. To maintain Dublin’s growth, our competence as a financial centre in areas like hedge funds, alternative risk management, securitisation and intellectual property management needs to be continually enhanced. Although much has been done by education providers to expand capacity in the provision of higher-level skills, there is a widespread feeling that the delivery of education and training services is quite fragmented and that there are significant gaps in the spectrum of courses available.
Equal in importance to the delivery of education and training services is the need to ensure that employees, on whom money is spent, are in fact good recipients of the investment. While the staff turnover mania of two years ago has now subsided to some extent, retention will be an ongoing problem unless addressed at the recruitment stage in a very structured way. The retention of people in whom employers have made significant investments in education and training will increasingly depend on the ability of the human resource frameworks within companies to deliver an acceptable working environment and especially a career path, for employees. The loss of intellectual capital through inadequate human resource policies is probably one of the biggest costs faced by the sector today.
The IDA, as most IFSC companies will know, has been researching, along with National College of Ireland (NCI), an initiative to create a structure to enhance the sectoral functioning of the education/ training/recruitment activities with the international industry. Labour issues within the IFSC have been a subject of constant review by the Department of the Taoiseach, the IDA, the Dublin Funds Industry Association (DFIA) and the Institute of Bankers among others, for a number of years. The task of creating a comprehensive structure for the financial services labour market has been anything but easy.
Those familiar with the process will remember the DFIA/IDA/FAS initiative (1994), the Purcell Committee (1996), the Institute of Bankers survey (1998), the ‘Prospectus’ study (1999) and the IDA study/proposal (2001). The current IDA/NCI proposition has drawn to some degree on the accumulation of experience and information gathered over the years from these initiatives but now benefits from the fact the for the first time a state-of-the-art educational campus will be available shortly in the form of the new NCI building at the heart of the IFSC.
The new IDA / NCI initiative proposes the establishment of a Centre of Excellence based at NCI through which a comprehensive range of educational, training and human resource services will be delivered, bringing together the principal existing service providers and NCI into a single functioning unit operating as a separate company under co-operative control.
PricewaterhouseCoopers were commissioned by IDA to study the proposed model and their report is now in the final stages of preparation. This is the first time that a truly comprehensive study of the people issues confronting the IFSC has been undertaken in the context of a proposal for the way forward.
The report gives a remarkable insight into the entire range of people issues confronting the international financial sector. The findings show a comprehensive endorsement of the proposal to create a rational structure for the delivery of education, training and human resource services. There is widespread support for the introduction of a ‘Q-Mark’ or ‘Passport’ for new entrants to the financial industry along the lines of the ECDL model. Some obvious points are also confirmed, for example, the single biggest reason for staff turnover is the lack of an acceptable career structure within employing organisations.
However these are simply snippets from a report packed with facts, figures, opinions and attitudes that give a signpost to the huge variety of issues facing line managers and human resource specialists in the IFSC. The IDA/NCI model reflects a similarity of policy thinking in competing financial centres. The government of Luxembourg has recently announced its intention to establish what amounts to a financial services university in partnership with London City University and others. The model is remarkably similar to that proposed for the NCI in its partnership approach and is obviously driven by the same sense of need to stay at the forefront of international finance as is felt by IFSC players. A similar industry driven initiative is also now happening in Edinburgh.
At its most basic, the need for an educational centre of excellence at the IFSC is about enhancing the competitiveness of the financial sector in Ireland. It is about reducing labour costs and enhancing efficiency and employee wellbeing. However it is also about the image of the IFSC in promoting itself internationally. A top line educational and training facility at the physical heart of the IFSC will create a profile for Dublin that will be hard to match.

Digg.com Del.icio.us Stumbleupon.com Reddit.com Yahoo.com

Home | About Us | Privacy Statement | Contact
©2024 Fintel Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.