Deirdre O'Shaughnessy talks to Ann Martyn of CPL Recruitment about Galway's jobs outlook.

Fears that the jobs market is declining are widespread, with redundancies becoming more common and talk of 'competitiveness' increasing, particularly with the background of the National Pay Talks.

To find out if jobs fears are well founded, this week the Galway Independent spoke to Ann Martyn, manager of recruitment company CPL's Galway office.

Ms Martyn specialises in IT and technical positions, while the company's office in Galway also recruits for engineering, finance, sales and office administration jobs, making it well placed to spot any real downturn in recruitment.

IT and engineering are two areas in which multinational companies are dominant, particularly in Galway, yet Ms Martyn has not seen a significant change in the market.

"Overall there is a lot of talk about a downturn and a slowdown. Since January we have seen a slowdown compared to last year, but then last year was extremely busy. There are still a lot of positions out there and there are always a lot of candidates."

In terms of recruitment, Ms Martyn has seen no freezes as yet and believes part of the slowdown may be due to a more sensible approach by both employees and employers.

"People are a bit more careful; they're not moving as often. They're looking at where the opportunities are, and where the companies are stable."

However, Galway remains a prime location for employers, with a large amount of people seeking to relocate to the city, she says.

One area of the market doing extremely well, despite the scaremongering, is engineering.

"There is always a demand for skilled engineers, in manufacturing and in Research and Development. That goes for IT as well. The first quarter has seen IT slow down but last year was very strong; companies took on a lot of people in the last year."

Since the beginning of April, there has been an increase on the first quarter, she adds.

"We have seen an increase since April. From the smaller clients right through to the multinationals, things have picked up since April. The multinationals take longer to hire to get the right people, but the jobs market here is still very good."

Despite highly-publicised job losses in Abbott, Ms Martyn believes the opportunities are still very good for skilled workers.

"The Abbott announcement was a big loss, but a lot of those people were very skilled and were able to source jobs in other companies. There have been changes in the market but they are very hard to determine."