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"Many millionaires of tomorrow will come from the technology sector," exclaimed Sean O'Sullivan, chief executive officer of Rococo Software and the chairman of the ISA conference organising committee.
The Irish Software Association (ISA) said on Monday that students and their parents should not be put off engineering and computer courses by the temporary downturn in IT. The technology sector in Ireland now had critical mass and the potential to provide well-paid and rewarding jobs, the organisation claimed.
These reassurances come in the wake of figures released earlier in the month which demonstrated a move away from IT and computer courses by this year's leaving cert students after the dot.com fall out and the decline of the technology and communications industry in general.
According to figures published earlier this month, applications for some computer courses were down by as much as 20 percent and the ISA points to figures from the CAO (Central Applications Office) which say that applications for engineering and computer courses in general this year had fallen to less than 44,000 from just over 60,000 last year.
According to a report in the Irish Times earlier this month, these attitudes have contributed significantly to an almost 13 percent drop in first preference applications to Dublin City University, a school that is recognised for its IT and computer programmes. There has been an 8.5 percent fall in the same type of courses at the University of Limerick.
The newspaper cited the dot.com crash as the reason for the fall off after discussing the situation with admissions officers.
And the fall off in numbers is of "serious" concern to the ISA, according to its chairman, Billy Huggard, who points out that the software sector in Ireland remains a strong industry.
Both O'Sullivan and Huggard say that students entering college this year are three to four years away from graduating and despite the current slowdown, the computer and technology sector currently employs some 100,000 people in Ireland with 30,000 of these in the software industry.
"The drop off in numbers might not affect us in the short term, but in the medium to long term it could have serious consequences," Huggard told ElectricNews.Net. "When things pick-up by the start of next year, there will be an increase in spending and demand across all sectors, but the people we need in the technology sector might not be there."
"It's not as though technology is going to go away; the question is what is the business community and the educational sector going to do to address these issues?" Huggard asked.
The comments from the ISA come on the eve of the Irish Software Association's 2002 Annual Conference, which will take place in O'Reilly Hall, Belfield on 28 May. The theme of the meeting is "Selling Software, Making Money," and its sponsors include ACT Venture Capital, Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels, Enterprise Ireland and Ion Equity.
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