Westmeath County Council can’t find enough engineers

A severe shortage of engineers has prompted Westmeath County Council to take a number of steps aimed at increasing interest in the field, and aimed at helping it keep services up until it manages to recruit more.

Staffing levels were raised by a number of councillors in their comments at the council’s April meeting, including Cllr Frankie Keena, who remarked that it seemed particularly difficult to recruit engineers.

“How is this being managed? Is there any way we could get agency staff to address the shortage?” he asked.

Director of services, Deirdre Reilly, said that the council has an open competition for executive and assistant engineers. “Unfortunately, there is a real lack of engineers coming to the public sector over the last number of months,” she said.

Adding that at present, across all careers, Westmeath County Council has 66 job vacancies, she said that many of them are for engineers.

“We’re working on it,” she said of the problem, also telling the elected members that the council had recently worked with Engineers Ireland on a STEPS project, aimed at introducing secondary school students to engineering.

“We’re also looking at a graduate programme for engineers and we’re going to look for some students for the summer months,” Ms Reilly added, going on to say that was also part of a drive to attract people of a younger age into the local authority system.

Cllr Keena asked what immediate effect the lack of engineers is having, to which council chief executive, Barry Kehoe, said that while the council struggles all the time to get the technical staff it needs, it deals with the pressures by prioritising the work that has to be done and making sure the council is in a position to avail of any grant funding that is available,

“And the other thing we have to do is employ consultants,” he stated, adding that costs the council more money and doesn’t offer the same flexibility.

“We prefer to have teams of appropriately qualified people here, but it’s just impossible to keep them staffed up,” he said.

Cllr Denis Leonard welcomed the move to take on student engineers, going on to state that “a huge amount” of young people are now studying climate and climate-related issues, and a lot that is related to what the council does: “But they are heading off into the private sector and sometimes abroad,” he said.

He added that it would be well worth getting some of them in as students and interns: “I know in education and a lot of other fields, we get some of our best people through internships. You get to see them on the ground and they could become full-time employees eventually.”