Relocation special: Giant steps forward
Youthful appeal
To those to have set up in Northern Ireland, the quality of the labour pool seems to be especially significant. The community is youthful, with some 40 per cent of the population 30 years old or younger. Allied to this, Northern Ireland has two universities that churn out around 2,000 IT graduates every year. This provides a skilled workforce in the very sectors the local regional development agencies are attempting to build.
‘We have some good people here,’ believes Thompson. ‘The workforce is highly skilled and young, and GCSE and A level results are above the UK average. Employers also benefit from the fact that salaries are around 70-80 per cent of what you’d expect to pay on the mainland.’
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Queen's University in Belfast is one source of skilled graduates for local businesses
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Network technology business Intelliden was attracted to Northern Ireland for precisely these reasons. With headquarters in Colorado, the company recently opened its own
£3.2 million research and development centre in the territory, creating 35 jobs, and vice-president of engineering Alan McKee says the quality of the education system played a vital role in this decision.
‘We had an existing relationship with the Southeast of England,’ McKee explains, ‘but we decided not to concentrate on developing too much there and chose to come to Northern Ireland instead because our chief executive Alan Black had spent some time here with a previous venture. He was hugely impressed with the quality of the people and the associated costs. Northern Ireland isn’t as cheap as India but it’s much cheaper than the US.’
Bro McFerren, managing director of Northbrook Technology (an offshore IT development centre for US insurer Allstate Corporation), identifies similar factors affecting his firm’s expansion. ‘Allstate were initially looking at just opening a data centre site in Northern Ireland,’ he recalls, ‘but they realised there are a lot of good software people here and decided to open an entire development base. We started in 1999 with around 250 people. Now we have around 1,500 employees. I’d say 1,200 of these are graduates and 60-70 per cent come from local universities.’
Help on hand
Realising how much of a draw a strong and skilled workforce can be, the local government, through Invest Northern Ireland, have put in place a series of steps to reward foreign firms recruiting in the area.
Intelliden is one firm to have taken advantage of this assistance, receiving £680,000 towards the opening of its £3.2 million centre. Colorado-based Fighting Bull Broadcast Technologies, meanwhile, received £250,000 to help it create 15 jobs at its European software centre.
The incentives extend beyond mere recruitment. As a general rule Invest Northern Ireland can provide pre-employment training grants covering up to 50 per cent of appropriate training costs, as well as the general employment grants it can offer as new workers are brought on board.
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