Careers and Jobs

Financial IT company First Derivatives will create 140 jobs in Newry where they already employ 130 staff. The company indicated that most of the jobs will be filled by locals (what about all the southern shoppers). The majority of the new jobs are consultancy with some management. First Derivatives provides consultancy and software services for financial institutions who want to analyse their exposure to debt.

Service & IT Software company ICS Computing will create 50 new jobs in Belfast at its headquarters. The new job creation is as a result of a new contract with NHS. ICS currently employs over 250 people at its Belfast office.

Other news impacting the north was that ASDA will create 7,000 new jobs which will surely mean more employed in Northern Ireland.

Fujitsu Services will create 150 jobs in Northern Ireland as part of an Stg11 million investment. The jobs will be created in Derry and Belfast. 120 Jobs will be created at the new Applications Services Centre in Derry and a further 30 jobs will be created at Fujitsu’s Belfast operations. The new jobs will be created in areas such as technical support and application management. The announcement will bring the total number employees to over 900 in Northern Ireland.

The IT services company will invest Stg9 million and InvestNI will invest Stg2 million in the project. The latest investment follows previous investments of over Stg20 million in the last year creating over 400 jobs.

Northern Ireland is becoming increasingly attractive to investors seeking to expand into Europe and it has seen its fair share of multinational activity over the last few years. Many view this as lost opportunity for the South but I feel the Island as a whole is benefiting.

Looks like the Northies are robbing our jobs again.

Kingspan has announced that it has created 40 new jobs in Newry as a result of a 6m euro investment by the groups Environmental & Renewables subsidiary.

Looks like it is all positive news for Newry at the minute. Newry has City status, Sainsbury’s (cheap shopping), 40 new jobs and even David McWilliams is writing about the town (I mean City) in today’s Independent.

What does the south get?

We get an announcement that NEW start up companies will create 800 new jobs over the next 3 years. This is on top of the 600 created by these companies so far. There are two ways you can look at this announcement.

Negative: Micheal Martin has nothing else positive to say and need some spin to deflect all the negative job loss announcements. I mean come on!! This would not have even made the papers two years ago.

Positive: This is great news for the Economy as we are breaking from the reliance of US multinationals. They created the Celtic Tiger and now these budding entrepreneurs are creating the Eccentric Tiger. Hey got to get a new name in before McWilliams does. Anyway don’t they always say that entrepreneurs are a bit different?

Good News for the Dublin today as ServiceSource announced the creation of 100 Multi-Lingual sales jobs in Cherrywood. ServiceSource is based in San Fran and established its EMEA offices in Dublin 2005. The company currently employs 175 staff in Ireland.

There was also good news for Belfast where Fidessa announce that it would be setting up a Development Center. This will mean the creation of 26 high skilled software programming jobs. Hey are these not the type of jobs the Government and IDA have promised us!! Apparantly we were considered but the availability of Engineers in Belfast swung it – hmmmm!!

Eircom have appointed Darren Lemon as the New General Manager for its Northern Ireland Business. Eircom recently won a huge contract in NI valued at 100m euro to build a world class infrastructure for Northern Ireland Civil Service. The new contract and the appointment indicate that Eircom in committed to establishing a strong presence in the region.

This is further indication that the North is growing from strength to strength as a region. You may remember that posted about a possible 180,000 jobs in NI should corporation tax be reduced.

The good news keep rolling for the north