Networking a vital part of jobs event

Midlands Career Expo 2024

A firm conclusion that one of the organisers of the Midlands Career Expo arrived at as the event was winding up on Saturday was that “they need to keep happening”.

Tom Griffith of MidlandJobs.ie was reflecting on what was by all accounts a successful day in response to a query from the Westmeath Examiner. He said it is a major task to put together an event like the expo, and each year the team wonder whether they can rise to the challenge again.

“I’d say first of all, they need to keep happening,” said Tom. “It’s a struggle to get an event organised, and you always think it’s going to be difficult next year, but every time we get to this stage of the day, you realise it’s good that it happened again, and it does need to continue happening. There’ll always be a need for this type of event, because roles are difficult to fill.”

Central to the day was those roles – the jobs that are available here in the midlands with scores of well established, high quality companies – and something Tom noticed was the number of visitors who had come from the Dublin region to Mullingar to see what’s on offer.

“They came from places like Celbridge, Lucan Leixlip, and you think, ‘the motorway goes in two directions’ – it doesn’t just go into Dublin, bringing people from the midlands to work. That’s certainly an interesting result from today, that there are now people starting to look west, look towards the midlands from wherever they are in the Dublin area. That’s pretty significant.”

Pointing out that there are a lot of vacancies as the economy is thriving, Tom said both employers and employees should “keep going, that’s what today proves – that there are candidates”.

“This is the place to be, and as other people have said, there’s great networking happening among all the different companies, great collaboration, which doesn’t come about every day – but everybody’s here, all the key players are here, and there’s great chats among them.

“The message then for the next time these events happen is, ‘let’s have the room even fuller’, and let’s have even more sharing and people letting job candidates know about it [the expo].

“I think it’s an event that’s going to grow and grow.”

That there was useful networking throughout the day was echoed by almost all the company representatives the Examiner spoke to. They agreed that the day was useful and most went home with handfuls of leads to follow up.

Jonathan Acton of Atlantic Care said: “We’ve noticed a huge turnout, and it’s encouraging to see all the people who are really interested in working in the care industry and with Atlantic Care. As jobs, expos go, this has been one of the busiest I’ve experienced in the last 15 years.

“We’ve had so much interest, we have at least 25 solid leads to follow up, people who are genuinely interested in working in the care industry, so we’re buzzing. We had a great day.”

Heather O’Reilly Duff from Watt Footprint said she and her colleagues had “talked to a lot of people across a lot of professions today”.

“It’s great to see that Mullingar is thriving. There’s a lot of businesses here and a lot of people looking for jobs, so hopefully we’ll have some good new business partnerships.” She said her firm has 24 new roles to fill between now and the end of the year, and the same in 2025, “so it’s definitely an exciting time for the company, there’s plenty of room, for mostly energy engineers and software engineers in the team.”

James Bourke, president of Mullingar Chamber, one of the entities organising the careers expo, said: “It’s great to see such large numbers of job seekers here, particularly younger people. We had our two guest speakers on the area of AI and sustainability, something young people need to start thinking about, and that’s why they were two of the topics that we focused in on.

“It’s wonderful to see when you put everyone in a room together how much opportunity there is in this area, and we have a huge buy-in from the businesses in the area, into the future job market in Mullingar and the wider midlands area. I’d say this year is one of the biggest crowds we’ve had, so it’s on onwards and upwards from here for the career expo and hopefully we’re back for 2025.”

John O’Connell of Stephens Cooke and Associates had a busy day: “It gives visibility of all the other businesses around, who’s in the area, and the presence to make sure people in the area know that there are jobs in the midlands, on their doorstep, from companies they might not necessarily know are here.

“Networking is a big part of the day – we went round and had chats with people and it’s great to get that level of interaction. The day was well organised too.”

Gary Nugent from Decotek found the expo “very positive” and said there was activity throughout the day at their stand. “Some of our roles are very specialised and we were surprised at the number of people who had the qualifications, or even had the interest,” he said.

Patricia Dunphy, services coordinator for Robotics and Drives, said: “We’ve seen a vibrant workforce coming through the door, very diverse, and a diverse and wide range of skills – from students coming from doing their Leaving Cert to first or second year at college, to more mature people looking for a career change.”

Aisling Nolan, chief people officer at Mergon Group, said her firm also had a great day and it was busy all the way through. “It’s fantastic to see so many local employers here, and people interested in working in the midlands.

“There’s a lot of interest from people with relevant skills for our business,” she said.

Others the Examiner spoke to included Michael Gardiner, Howden Insurance Brokers, Dominick Street, Mullingar, who said the day was good from the point of view of brand awareness; and Niall O’Shaughnessy from Home Instead, who said: “It’s great to get our name out there and meet people in the area.

"We have job opportunities in Westmeath, Longford and Offaly, we have care-givers in probably every village and town in the three counties, so there’s opportunities for everybody and we fully train our people, there’s a lot of support for our care-givers – it can be lovely, rewarding work, it can be tough, but there’s huge support and we care as much about our care-givers as we do about our clients.”