McKevitt wants more creative media courses | Latest Newry News, Newry Sport and Newry Business for Newry City

McKevitt wants more creative media courses

SDLP South Down MLA Karen McKevitt has said that the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure needs to engage more closely with further and higher education institutions which can prepare young people to work in the creative industries.

McKevitt, who is party spokesperson on Culture, Arts and Leisure (CAL) said, “I want to welcome the initiative taken by Southern Regional College in making creative media a core element of its £500,000  i3 (Industry, innovation and incubation programme).

“The Assembly CAL committee on which I sit has studied the potential of the creative industries and identified shortages of thousands of skilled graduates.

“Our committee learned that in the last four years the ‘App Industry’ which just consists of mobile development and games, has been responsible for the creation of half a million jobs in the USA. If we scale that down to Northern Ireland we could be talking about 2500  jobs.

“But we are turning out only 300 software engineers a year which is fewer than the number who retire or die. There are 650 known vacancies in larger companies and there are known to be in many more in smaller ones.

She added, “It is very important that DCAL as the responsible department of government should work closely with those in the educational sector who want to tailor their course offerings to fill this gap.”

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Posted by on Feb 2 2013. Filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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