Careers · Technology
One of the few well-paid jobs where nobody asks about your degree after the first one.
Developers write the code behind apps and systems. The job is less solitary than films suggest. Most of the day goes on reading other people's code, arguing about what to build, and repairing things that worked yesterday.
Ireland has far more of this work than you'd expect for a country this size, across both the large foreign companies and a lot of Irish ones nobody has heard of.
There is more than one. None of these is the "proper" one.
Three or four years through the CAO. Strongest grounding, and the simplest way into the graduate programmes the bigger employers recruit through.
Software and ICT apprenticeships exist here and hardly anyone mentions them. You work, you study alongside it, you come out with a qualification and real years behind you.
A computing course in further education leads to junior roles directly, or into a degree through links with the universities.
It happens, and this industry does care more about what you can build than where you sat. But there is no structure, nobody to ask, and you need finished work to show. Easier as a second career than a first job.
Points for computing courses vary enormously, and there are options well down the range, not only at the top. Maths helps and some courses require it, but it is less of a wall than people assume. Apprenticeships and further education ask for a lot less. Check the specific course.
Entry salaries in this sector are high compared with most other first jobs in Ireland and they move quickly in the early years. The apprenticeship route pays from the start.
“You need to have been coding since you were twelve.”
Plenty of working developers started at eighteen. Or thirty. Early helps, it is not a requirement.
“You need honours maths.”
Some courses want it, many do not, and most of the day-to-day work uses very little of it.
“It has to be a well-known university.”
After your first job nobody asks. What you have built is the whole conversation.
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