Best educated young population in Europe and other fairy-stories.

AlekSmart

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/parcel-firm-ups-to-cut-200-jobs-at-call-centre-1866877.html

Somewhat low key little piece on the winding down of The Big Brown`s (UPS) Irish Help-Desk operation.

Spend a little time reading the article and the contributory factor to the decision and it becomes clear that our much vaunted educational system may not be quite as good as we`ve constantly been told.

Never mind another EU language....displaying a reasonable grasp of the 2nd official language is presenting difficulties enough !!!

djk1000

Lets just say that I have an imaginary friend that works for an imaginary company called USP.

My friend has been telling me stories for months about people being fired for ridiculous reasons at USP. Management have been itching for excuses to cut numbers without having to pay redundancy.

It seems now that they have run out of people they can fire. I also know that there is absolutely no problems with languages, they have CV's flying in every day with well qualified people desperate for work, in fact, there are people wth language skills that work in english all day because there is no need for them to work in foreign speaking departments. Unfortunately, there are cheaper places to have a call centre. I don't like the dishonesty of their PR spin.

Riskymove

the Indo as usual just printing the story as laid out by UPS...no attempt to investigate claims

ejmaztec

djk1000 wrote: »

Lets just say that I have an imaginary friend that works for an imaginary company called USP.

My friend has been telling me stories for months about people being fired for ridiculous reasons at USP. Management have been itching for excuses to cut numbers without having to pay redundancy.

It seems now that they have run out of people they can fire. I also know that there is absolutely no problems with languages, they have CV's flying in every day with well qualified people desperate for work, in fact, there are people wth language skills that work in english all day because there is no need for them to work in foreign speaking departments. Unfortunately, there are cheaper places to have a call centre. I don't like the dishonesty of their PR spin.

Perhaps people think that they have no problems with languages.

ei.sdraob

UPS promised a "significant" redundancy package to ease the blow to the workers in Tallaght, Dublin.

hmm ....

djk1000

I mean CV's from native speakers of relevant languages

Sponge Bob

Tallaghtfornian English sounds great on the phone

dan_d

I heard the UPS reason for closing up the other day....and I thought it was weird. They can't find people with the necessary language skills??

I wonder have they tried looking for Graduates. I can guarantee you there are plenty of unemplyerd Arts grads out there with excellent language skills, given the countries in question would speak French and German and Italian - mainly. It's not like they're looking for Chinese or something.
I would have thought that this is an odd time to close for a reason like that. Where'd they find the people in the last few years with those skills?

thebman

I don't believe there is a shortage of foreign lanuage skills. Up to recently there were plenty of jobs requiring foreign languages and with recent layoffs, you'd expect that the market would have enough of these people available to fulfill their needs.

Obviously they just want to move to a cheaper region for their call centre. Can't argue with that, I've never done business with UPS anyway, didn't even know they were in the country TBH.

There are plenty of foreign language students studying here that would take the jobs and stay a year in Ireland I'm sure as I've met them :-/

Riskymove

I dont think we were ever the "best educated in europe"

however, the fact that we had a "well educated" english speaking workforce was a factor in attracting services