Amplified Podcast: November 2026
‘If you haven't got enough engineers, you just simply won't be able to deliver the great plans that we have.’
How prepared is Ireland to deliver on its most ambitious infrastructure, housing and climate targets? And do we have the engineering talent needed to make them a reality? In the latest episode of Amplified, Engineers Ireland President, Dave Murphy explores many of the themes from his recent Presidential Address, including the growing shortage of engineers, the challenge of retaining talent and the opportunity to attract more women into engineering. The podcast delves into his career journey from process design engineer to CEO of global project delivery company, PM Group, and discusses the importance of developing communication skills alongside technical expertise.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
Missing the mark…massively
‘We're simply not producing enough engineers. There's a massively ambitious National Development Plan, €275 billion over 10 years. If the demand profile continues as it has done for the last couple of years, then we're looking at a shortage of around 6,000 engineers a year out to 2030 and beyond.
Holding on to our best
‘We can't assume the Irish engineer is going to work in Ireland and work on Irish projects. They can work in Switzerland, the UK, Australia, Canada, and that's very attractive to them.’
Correcting the gender balance
‘The single biggest opportunity to increase the numbers quickly would be to attract more females across all branches of engineering. If you look at the total number of students in college in Ireland, which is about 90,000 graduating every year, it's actually 55% female, 45% male, which I was surprised at.’
Meet our guest, Dave Murphy
Dave Murphy is the President of Engineers Ireland and former Chief Executive Officer of PM Group. He led global expansion across twenty countries with over four thousand employees and brings over forty years of sector experience as a Fellow of Engineers Ireland and Chartered Chemical Engineer.
Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-murphy-5304927/
Transcription
For your convenience here is an AI transcription:
Dusty Rhodes 0:02
Right now, on Amplified...
Dave Murphy 0:05
The results are there for all to see. I mean, the calibre of engineers we produce here in Ireland is second to none, and I've worked with engineers from all over the world, to the United States, to China, and the Irish engineer will hold their own anywhere in the world. I guarantee that.
Dusty Rhodes 0:25
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Ireland podcast. Today, we're getting into one of the most urgent issues facing our country, from housing and renewable energy to transport and critical infrastructure. Ireland has massive ambitions, but delivering them is going to need a strong, sustainable pipeline of skilled engineers. Our guest is an expert in this area and has a passion for the real-world impact of the skills gap and the practical steps that we need to take to inspire, attract, and retain the next generation. It's a pleasure to welcome former CEO of PM Group and the president of Engineers Ireland, Dave Murphy. How are you, Dave?
Dave Murphy 1:09
Very good, Dusty. Thanks for the opportunity, and it's a pleasure to meet you,
Dusty Rhodes 1:15
Dave, as president of Engineers Ireland, you are in a very influential position. So, before we get into what we're going to talk about today about attracting and growing engineering careers, I'd love to kind of get a little bit about you and your point of view in the world and your experience. Can I ask you: can you remember the first time where you went 'Oh, this engineering is cool. This is for me'.
Dave Murphy 1:39
Yeah, I can. I certainly struggled with it for the first couple of years. You know, struggled with the technical content. You know, I wasn't certainly not an A student, but I stuck with it. We had a very good class. Everybody kind of supported one another. But I think what the sort of light bulb moment for me was when I went on three months' work experience at the end of my third year. So, I went out to work in a real-world plant. It was a place called Galeo in Little Island, which was later acquired by Pfizer. And suddenly, you were in a real manufacturing plant with real equipment and real unit operations. And it was like, you know; it was just a whole new world for me. And suddenly, a lot of this the theory that we had been learning about for the previous few years all started to make sense. You know, you saw a picture of a pump or a drawing of a pump, and you heard about all these terms like NPSH and stuff. And some of it was like gobbledygook, and suddenly you saw a real pump, and you went, 'Ah, okay, that's what a pump looks like. That's what a battery reactor looks like. That's what a still looks like, and that's how it works'. And you were, you know; I did a lot of dealings with the operators on the plant who would explain to you how things worked. So, I came back and I was sort of reinvigorated when I came back into fourth year, and I actually ended up doing quite well in my final year. And I think it was as a result of that, suddenly stuff started to make sense, and I maybe took away a lot of the mystique.
Dusty Rhodes 3:01
And that's kind of where you got the grow for it, I suppose. And then you found family is the word I'm going to use, right? Because you joined PM Group fairly early in your career, and you were there for a long time. Like, what was it about that company that made it so comfortable to stay?
Dave Murphy 3:18
It's a word that's been either owned a lot, but it was definitely the culture and the people. PM Group is a very unique company with a very unique culture, and it's exactly like you said. It's a very family. Even as it's grown, it's over 4000 people now, but it still retains that sort of family culture. You know, no place for egos, a very flat structure. First, you know, open doors, first name terms, and that was all down to the founders and the original leaders in the organisation. They had sort of built that very nice culture. It was totally different to the place I worked in, you know, the first couple of years of my career. So, it was like a breath of fresh air coming into this very unique company. When I joined it in 1989, it was still a relatively small company, probably less than 100 people, and only with offices in Ireland and Cork and Dublin. But the company gradually, on the back of multinational investment here, grew, continued to grow, and then started to internationalise.
Dusty Rhodes 4:18
But I think from what I've heard about PM Group, they do something now. I don't know if it's unusual within the industry, but I'll ask you. A lot of people in PM Group have got literally skin in the game.
Dave Murphy 4:28
That's correct, and that's one of the unique, yeah, features. Employee owned.
Dusty Rhodes 4:32
Yeah, explain that to me.
Dave Murphy 4:34
I'm pretty sure it's the only employee owned engineering company in the country.
Dusty Rhodes 4:37
Okay.
Dave Murphy 4:38
All employees, in all jurisdictions have the opportunity to become shareholders in the company, even though it's a private company.
Dusty Rhodes 4:46
How does that affect you and other people that you know, like mentally? Because if you're a shareholder within a business, you feel like you're part owner. But is the shareholding so small that it's not worth thinking about, or is it significant? I mean, what kind of numbers are you talking about?
Dave Murphy 5:02
Look, there's probably I don't know what the current numbers are. I think when I left, there was probably around 13 or 1400 shareholders in total across the company, and that's growing every year. It was quite difficult to put, you know, and complex to put that in place in a lot of the international countries, and in some countries, it just simply doesn't work. Like say a place like China, you can't do that legally. But what we do, we use phantom shares. They're called or synthetic equities, another expression. So, they just mirror the performance of the share, but they're not an actual share.
Dusty Rhodes 5:33
Today you've moved on, and you are President of Engineers Ireland. Congratulations! I think it's a very influential position just within the industry overall. What does serving in that position mean to you personally and professionally?
Dave Murphy 5:50
Firstly, you know it's a great honour to be asked to do it, and I suppose when I finished my career, you know you're kind of thinking, what will I do next? And this opportunity came, and people said to me, you know, 'you'll know what's for you when it comes at you', and I, you know, am probably a bit different to a lot of people. I didn't want to, you know, do the board circuit and become an non-executive director on boards of other companies. And I had, I had invitations to do that, but the opportunity to come on board with Engineers Ireland came up, and you know, I didn't need to think for more than five seconds. I said, 'Yeah, that's something I'd certainly like to do'. And it was more from the point of view of giving something back to the career that had been so good to me. And I thought this is a unique opportunity where I can give back, you know, my time, my expertise to what's a great organisation. And I suppose you know I can use the profile that I have within the industry and the you know the connections that I have to improve the profile of Engineers Ireland within the broader engineering construction sector in Ireland. So I'm conscious of that. You're an officer for four years, so you have four years on the board and then one year as president. So it's trying to do as much as you can to raise the profile of engineering right across the spectrum. Particularly, I suppose, as much as you can with younger engineers, with school students, and just try and make people think more about engineering. And then, I guess, at government level, we're advocates for the profession. We're very conscious that we have to try and not just raise issues with government because government knows a lot of the time what the issues are, but be in a position to offer solutions or suggest solutions. Say, look, you should think about doing this, and we can help you with it.
Dusty Rhodes 7:35
Dave, let's get into engineering talk. All right, looking forward to this because I said in the intro that we are looking at a critical shortage of engineering talent. Why? Why is this happening in this day and age?
Dave Murphy 7:50
Yeah, I mean, there's like a lot of these things when you get under the hood, and I had to do a lot of research for my presidential address around this, and you know, a lot of what I found out was quite surprising. You know, it's like a lot of problems. It's complex, but I suppose probably the fundamental thing is we're simply not producing enough engineers here, and the numbers have been growing. But when you compare us with other European countries, the proportion of engineers graduating as a percentage of the total number of graduates is quite low here. It's less than 10% in the Republic of Ireland, and it's even less in Northern Ireland. It's about 5% in Northern Ireland. And then you look at a country like Finland; it's 17%. Austria, 20%. Germany, 21%. So, the average in the EU is 14%. So, we're below the average, well below it, so that's probably the number one thing to try and get more, more students entering engineering, help them to see the journey through, and we just need to graduate more engineers.
Dusty Rhodes 8:54
What do you think would happen, all right, to us as a country, to our housing and our infrastructure goals if we don't have enough engineers?
Dave Murphy 9:04
Well, we just won't be able to achieve those goals, Dusty. It's quite simple, you know. It really is down to that. If you haven't got enough engineers, you just simply won't be able to deliver the great plans that we have. There's a massively ambitious national development plan, you know, 275 billion over 10 years. I mean, it's an absolutely enormous number. But behind that number are real projects. I mean, imagine how many engineers Dublin Metrolink is going to need alone.
Dusty Rhodes 9:32
Yeah.
Dave Murphy 9:32
You know, hundreds, thousands, probably. You know, engineers and technicians, and that's just one project.
Dusty Rhodes 9:40
Yeah, yeah.
Dave Murphy 9:40
You know, it will just slow things down. It's a big, big change. And then if everybody, you know, you have the multinational sector is still barreling along. You've got all of the infrastructure projects. You've got all the climate change projects. If offshore wind takes off, you're literally into thousands of engineers.
Dusty Rhodes 9:58
And we need the man. So, it's kind of it's in around like primary school and secondary school really level that we need to be attracting kids into the business.
Dave Murphy 10:08
Yeah, and it's not going to go away either. It's you know it is very much you know you have to look out 10-20 years and say you know Ireland the population is growing with massive infrastructure deficit, so it's not like a short term, three, four year burst. This is going to go on for 2030 years and beyond.
Dusty Rhodes 10:26
This problem was really kind of what you were addressing in your presidential address. Share with me what was the core message of that speech.
Dave Murphy 10:36
The core message was that at the moment we have a shortage. The gap, you know, we've done independent research. We commissioned KHSK economic consultants to do research, and they looked at the projections. So, if the demand profile continues as it has done for the last couple of years, then we're looking at a shortage of around 6000 engineers a year out to 2030 and beyond. That's an additional topic to normal. We need an additional 6000. They're big numbers, but I'm quite happy that the numbers are right because if you just look at the NDP alone, that would swallow up 15 to 20,000 engineers if we could deliver all of it by 2035. So, and you know, we need a mixture of initiatives to solve that problem, both short term, medium term, and long term, we definitely need to attract more international engineers here. But of course, you run into, you know, where you're going to house them, and is there sufficient school capacity and childcare and all of those things? And you know, we're competing now in a global, very much a global market for engineers. So your Irish engineer that comes out of college, you know, has the world as their oyster. So we can't assume the Irish engineer is going to work in Ireland and I work on Irish projects. They can work in Switzerland. They can work in the UK. They can work in Australia. They can work in Canada, and you know that's very attractive to them.
Dusty Rhodes 11:58
Do you think that is happening? That you know, kind of, we are training engineers here. We are always saying in the business, engineering is a passport to the world. You can go anywhere, do anything. All right. So, like, are we literally shooting ourselves in the foot with the few engineers that we do have in college, and we say, go off to Australia now and have a grand time?
Dave Murphy 12:18
I wouldn't see it like that. I mean, obviously, you know that becomes a bit of a circular thing because you know a lot of them go for their you know three four years...
Dusty Rhodes 12:27
Then and then they come back, yeah.
Dave Murphy 12:29
Then they come back so they're getting very good experience as well so I don't think we should look on that as a problem I think we should look at that as success I guess the issue is we just if you were producing twice as many, it wouldn't be as much of a problem because let's say you know 20% of them go overseas.
Dusty Rhodes 12:48
Yeah
Dave Murphy 12:49
Engineers are very attractive to other sectors like banking, investment banking, insurance because they're so numerically literate. They're very attractive to other firms.
Dusty Rhodes 13:01
And Irish engineers have such a great name worldwide as well. Like, but you said we need twice as many. Okay, you probably have this number better than I do. What's the gender split in engineering in Ireland at the moment? Have you any idea?
Dave Murphy 13:14
The gender split in the profession working Engineers Ireland estimates at between 12 and 15%. So it's very low. Now that's taking the total population of engineers working here, and that's not a surprise to me for my own career. Pictures a little bit better in third level. There's about 25% currently. The single biggest opportunity to increase the numbers quickly would be to attract more females across all branches of engineering, because there's a 25% wedge there. If you could get that 25% up to 50%, or in fact, if you look at the place in college, I was surprised at this. If you look at the total numbers students in college in Ireland, which is about 90,000 graduating every year, it's actually 55% female, 45% male, which I was surprised at. There's a 30% wage there. If you could turn the dial very quickly, and it would make a massive impact.
Dusty Rhodes 14:05
Well, do you think that's something that is going to be done with Engineers Ireland, with engineering firms, with government?
Dave Murphy 14:12
I think it has to be multi-agency approach. There's a lot of great initiatives going on, you know, and even this podcast I listened to Magella Henchion on Amplified, and to Gemma McCarthy. I mean, they are fantastic because these are real examples of great female leaders that you know are speaking so positively about their own careers in engineering that if you're a female student listening, I say, 'Yeah, God, that could be for me', you know, there's no magic bullet. You just got to get out there and roll up your sleeves and get you know engaged with females in schools and secondary schools and show them how this career can be really attractive to them.
Dusty Rhodes 14:54
Have you come across any schemes or anything like that in other countries around the world? Where they are getting people in at a young age and getting them interested in engineering schemes that have worked, obviously.
Dave Murphy 15:07
I haven't personally, but other countries, and I suppose I'd be very familiar with Poland because PM Group had a very big operation there, and what was interesting there that the split was very much 50-50, unlike here. And I think it's more just the tradition there was different. It wasn't seen as engineering is only for men, and maybe it goes back. I think it goes back a long way, right back to the you know the communist era. There, engineering was never seen as this male-only dominated profession. So, you would find very much in your disciplines over there. It was all engineering disciplines. The split was, you know, pretty much 50-50, and we were surprised at that. And they're fantastic engineers. A lot of them working here in Ireland with us, but also big operation in Poland. So, you know, I think it was more tradition. This is all long-term stuff. You know, if you want to change it from 25% up to 50%. You're probably looking at can we get there by 10 years? And a big part of my talk, Dusty, was around the lack of data, the lack of hard data and information. So, I think we need to do a lot more research in this area, both the numbers and the metrics, and then tracking those annually, and you know seeing are we moving the dial, and then also I think a big part of it is this the soft side of it. You know, listening, speaking with female students, female engineers, and trying to understand what are the barriers, and then try and work to remove those barriers. So there's a kind of the hard data, and then the soft survey type, interview type data.
Dusty Rhodes 16:40
But especially if you can show hard data from other territories where it has worked, I find it really frustrating because I hear it a lot. Is oh, we're not getting enough women interested in engineering. It's a long-term thing, and we must do something about it. And this is you know 2026 when we're talking going into 2027. Do you know what I mean? It's like I think about World War Two because that was a huge shift. All the men were all fighting, so women were in the factories, and you know society is all the better for it. But 1945 was 80 years ago. Like, how long do you need? Sorry, my frustration is coming out. I apologise.
Dave Murphy 17:18
Yeah, no, but, you're not wrong. But it's one of those things you got to stick at it. You know, I know from my own career, it's difficult, but you got to keep at it, keep at it, and you know.
Dusty Rhodes 17:30
I suppose, and it is hard because you're trying to change society in a certain way, aren't you?
Dave Murphy 17:36
Yeah, like you know, trying to shift mindsets.
Dusty Rhodes 17:40
That's it.
Dave Murphy 17:43
Yeah, yeah, and and that does take time, like you know, but it does, it does, and there's great work going on. Like I'd call out, there's a recently established society in Engineers Ireland called Women in Engineering. It was only set up five years ago, but they have an annual event in the Mansion House. I was there just a few months ago in June. My God, what an event! 300 female engineers in a room, and the power and the enthusiasm, and particularly young, you know, what was really striking was a lot of young women. They're the big influencers because you know it's more easy for a say a girl in secondary school to identify with these young role models, and they're doing fantastic work just in terms of raising the profile, raising the issues, trying to you know get behind them and understand what they need to do as well.
Dusty Rhodes 18:23
Yeah. Well, listen, you didn't mention that Ireland is a young country, and what are we? Are we 100 years at this stage?
Dave Murphy 18:30
Yeah, 100 years.
Dusty Rhodes 18:31
Well, if you want to take 100 years, you could say we became a republic in 1940. I can't remember; it's way before any of our times. But anyways, but less than 100 years as a republic, I think, is a very, very young country, and I think we are developing at a rapid pace because a lot of people who are kind of in management these days would have grown up in the 80s and they remember those days, and they're still working now. And they're kind of like, if you have that breadth of experience, it's like you look back and you go, oh my god, it's like going from you know kind of caveman days to the 1800s, like in 50, it really is. No, no, but it is. Yeah, like the internet has changed everything. AI is coming in, and like everything is going so fast. So I think that that change, fingers crossed, will happen. Anyway, all of that to one side. I'd like to ask your advice for various people who are considering engineers, particularly students who are considering an engineering degree today, and they're looking at their whatever. What college will I go to? I think I'll go for law, medicine, engineering. Why would you say choose engineering?
Dave Murphy 19:31
I think the possibilities that engineering offers for a career are, you know, the breadth of possibilities are fantastic. There's obviously so many different disciplines of engineering to start with, so you know, civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical. Huge shortage of electrical engineers, electronic engineers, computing. You know, there's a vast array of disciplines to start with, and usually engineers. You know, they go in and a general engineer, and then they choose which discipline. Then they want to follow, you know. Once you come out with that degree, the number of possible directions you can go, and I've seen this in my own career. So some people stick with the technical and become like really expert engineers, and then other people go broader. Like in my own career, I started out as a process design engineer, but very quickly ended up as a project engineer running small projects and then managing bigger projects, that I ended up being a project manager, and then I got into general management. Other colleagues of mine got into business development. You know, so there's any number of career possibilities opened up for you. It doesn't mean that you spend your whole career being an engineer, or you may you have the possibility to do other things.
Dusty Rhodes 20:44
True. For engineers who are listening, what would you say is the advice they should pass on to somebody who's 16 or 17 or 18 and the kind of thinking, what do I do? What should they do now?
Dave Murphy 20:56
If you have young people in your wider circle, encourage them to consider engineering. Tell them about your own experience in your own career and what you've done. You know, we're probably not great at advocating for our profession. You know, engineers do a lot of their best work quietly behind the scenes, and everything works because an engineer has done their job properly, but probably not in general built for being out singing our praises. So, we have to do more in that regard. We have to be better at communicating the, you know, the positive nature of engineering, and you know that whole the good that engineering does, the creative side of it. You know, you can look around the hotel room, and nothing would exist without engineers and the lights, the doors, the plumbing. We have to do more to encourage the next generation. And then, if I was talking to students secondary school that was thinking about engineering, I say find an engineer and talk to them and ask them about their career. Ask them to tell you about it and ask for their advice. So, so we can definitely do more to advise young people, and then obviously mentor them. There's probably something we can do for the kids in college as well, because you know, kids. I went out to speak to the kids in first year kids in MTU there recently, and I was saying, you know, everybody struggles at some point during college. You'd want to be unique, you know, you have your ups and your downs, but if they had some form of mentorship, you know that somebody they could speak with, you know that would keep encouraging them. Don't give up. Keep at it. You know, this isn't unusual that you'll have a crisis of confidence halfway through, or you fail a couple of exams and you have to repeat. That happened me in my own career. So you just need somebody to say, you know, relax. It'll be okay. It'll be worth it in the end. Keep at it, you know. Because engineering, even you know, we put a lot of effort into getting students to choose engineering, so they get into engineering. But there's, you know, there's quite high attrition. There's quite high attrition in third level in general, but engineering is is quite high because it's challenging, you know. It is it's not an easy course, but it's definitely very doable. And if I can get through it, you know, I'm certainly not a, as I said, an A student.
Dusty Rhodes 23:11
Dave, you've been looking after people and their careers in PM for a long time. Here's a question, just on behalf of a working engineer, okay, who wants to grow into bigger projects? Maybe not necessarily management. Maybe management, whatever. But what would you tell them to focus on over the next two years?
Dave Murphy 23:30
I probably always say the same thing to people: your sort of technical skills that you come out of college with are a given, and you build on them through working and working with more senior engineers and mentorship and all that, I would say that probably the biggest thing is your interpersonal skills, your communication skills. You know, I still think engineers, particularly, don't come out of college well enough equipped in that regard. They're definitely better. You know, the ones I meet now coming out are so much. I mean, we came out. We, you know, our eyes were down. We were like so lacking in confidence. You know, when we came out in the 1980s, definitely the kids I see coming out of college now are definitely much more confident. But I would still say to them, I was asked the question, Natalie, what would you advise? You know, young people going for interviews. What piece of advice you going to say? When I'm the first thing is, don't try to be somebody else. Be yourself. Speak about your personal interests. I mean, when I used to interview people, and I'm not unique in this, I'd always try and scratch my surface, find out, you know, what were their hobbies, what were their interests. You know, you were trying to get more of a window into the person. You took it for granted that technically they could do what they were supposed to do. It was more trying to find out how would they work in a team, what kind of personality would where they would they integrate well into the group and the wider team. So I would say it's focus on that. And you know, I think a lot of time engineers are probably you know it's probably unfair to tar them with. Same brush, but when you do that, that personality profiling a lot to come out, you know, a certain band, and they're maybe naturally more introverted a lot, and so you probably a lot of them have to work harder, maybe at the interpersonal skills. But I would say that's probably the biggest thing.
Dusty Rhodes 25:16
So be true to who you are, because if people like who you are, well, then everybody just gets on better. And even if you are introverted, you could just go, "Well, I'm kind of quite shy. I just want to be left in a corner."
Dave Murphy 25:30
Yeah, it doesn't come naturally to anybody. I think I would probably come across as very extroverted now. And you know, I've been used to being out front a lot of my career. But I remember when I was at the start of my career, if I had to speak up in a meeting or get up in front of a group and talk, I was absolutely terrified. I mean, terrified, nearly sick to my stomach. So, like, you can conquer that, you know, but you have to embrace that opportunity and do more. And the more you do it, and the more at ease you become.
Dusty Rhodes 25:56
How do you conquer it?
Dave Murphy 25:58
You just have to do more. Put yourself out and force yourself to do it.
Dusty Rhodes 26:03
How do you feel when you go and do something really uncomfortable, like I'm gonna have to say something at this meeting? I'm gonna have to. I don't want to. They're all gonna laugh at me. Blah blah blah. And then you go and you say it. How do you feel after?
Dave Murphy 26:16
Oh, it's like when you've done it. You, it's a huge sense of satisfaction, even exhilaration, like when you deliver, you know, like presidential address. Obviously, you put a huge amount of effort into it. You're probably naturally a bit nervous beforehand, but when you've delivered it and you've done it, and the feedback's good, I mean, it's exhilarating. And speaking up at a meeting, as young engineers have to do, and they've got to say something. Everyone is looking, you know, you're sitting in a room with 10 people, maybe a couple of clients, and you've got to say something, and that can be quite terrifying for a young engineer, and they're not sure what they're going to say. But you know, probably do all the usings you practice, you think about it offline, practice saying it out loud in the toilet or something, and then you just have to go in and and say it and get over. and And once you've done it a few times, suddenly you go yeah this is and I'm more relaxed now I can and and then you start doing it all the time and you grow in confidence.
Dusty Rhodes 27:06
A friend of mine is a stand-up comedian and he says ask people any question you want he says anything no matter how inappropriate or unusual or weird is because he says it's amazing the amount of people who will answer you. So same thing. Speak up. God knows what'll happen. You know what I mean. Listen, we've been very doom and gloom about the industry. We definitely need more engineers. We need more women to step up to the plate. Please, please come in. But on the flip side of the doom and gloom, what makes you optimistic about the future of Irish engineering?
Dave Murphy 27:38
When you go around and visit the colleges as my colleague, who's vice president, Úna Parsons. Úna Parsons will be coming in after me as the president. And Úna comes from academia herself, and she's going around visiting the deans of engineering in all of the colleges. And like the reports, like the fantastic work that's going on in all of those colleges to grow the next generation of engineers. And you know the colleges are challenged with funding as well, and with resources, and trying to you know increase the numbers. So, they need all the help they can get from Engineers Ireland, from the Department of Education and Government, and so on. But there is great work going on, and I think the results are there for all to see. I mean, the calibre of engineers we produce here in Ireland is second to none, and I've worked with engineers from all over the world, the United States to China, and the Irish engineer will hold their own anywhere in the world. I can guarantee that they've got the technical capability, but they've also got the personality type. That's it's engaging with people. You know, they're sociable. They go on and they have fantastic careers. I could give you so many great examples. That makes me optimistic, and you know the numbers of females. I know we we're doom and gloom with that, but it is growing slowly. We just need to make it grow faster. In fact, my youngest daughter she came to the event. She did engineering, and again she found it difficult, but she doesn't regret it for a moment what she did. You know, as a career choice, so that makes me optimistic. Think the young ones I see coming out now.
Dusty Rhodes 29:03
Well, listen. If you would like to find out more about Dave Murphy's Presidential Address or to read the full report on Ireland's engineering workforce, you'll find all the links and details in the description area of this podcast. For now, though, Dave Murphy, President of Engineers Ireland, thank you so much for joining us.
Dave Murphy 29:19
Thank you very much, Dusty. It was my pleasure.
Dusty Rhodes 29:22
If you enjoyed our conversation today, please do share this episode with a colleague or friend in the industry. You can find us by searching for Engineers Ireland wherever you get your podcasts. The Amplified Podcast is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland. For more episodes, industry insights, and career development opportunities, visit our main hub at engineersireland.ie. Until next time, for myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.