July 20, 2026
The Irish labour market is softening after several tight years. There were 141,800 people unemployed in Q1 2026 and the unemployment rate rose to 4.9%, up from 4.3% a year earlier (source: CSO, Labour Force Survey Q1 2026 Key Findings, 2026). Long-term unemployment climbed alongside it to 41,300 people, or 1.4% of the labour force, up from 0.9% (source: CSO, Labour Force Survey Q1 2026, 2026). Employability programmes are being asked to move more participants into work at exactly the moment the openings are harder to secure.
The upskilling landscape is expanding in parallel. Over 25,000 upskilling places were taken up by employees through Skills to Advance in 2024 in areas including sustainability, digital and robotics, and Springboard+ 2025 opened 7,719 places on 249 courses across 37 higher education institutions (sources: SOLAS, 2024 FET figures, 2025; HEA, Springboard+ 2025 launch, May 2025). A modern employability programme sits between that training supply and live employer demand, and needs a way to connect the two.
Ireland runs employability at scale through further education and higher education. SOLAS reports over 400,000 Further Education and Training places taken up in 2024, from 229,000 unique learners nationally (source: SOLAS, 2024 Further Education and Training figures, January 2025). Graduate outcomes are measured centrally by the HEA, with 80.2% of the Class of 2024 in employment 9 months after graduation (source: HEA, Graduate Outcomes Survey Class of 2024, November 2025). For any employability programme, the constraint is rarely audience volume, it is access to genuine, still-open roles participants can actually apply to.
Spacewalk gives your programme a private, branded job board so participants get live vacancies as part of the coaching journey rather than as an afterthought.
Build your branded Spacewalk job board and invite your talent community in minutes
Whether you choose to stream roles automatically, invite employers or post them yourself they are automatically matched to your talent pool
Track applications, placements and community engagement from one reporting dashboard
Unlike generic job boards, Spacewalk gives you a branded, private or public jobs marketplace your talent actually trust, with sourcing, matching and reporting running automatically in the background.
Personal data on participants is regulated under the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, with the Data Protection Commission acting as Ireland's supervisory authority (source: Data Protection Commission, What we do). Programmes should hold participant data on a clear lawful basis, keep it only as long as needed for outcome reporting and let participants exercise their access and erasure rights.
Hiring is separately covered by the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2015, which prohibit discrimination on nine grounds including gender, age, disability, race and membership of the Traveller community (source: Workplace Relations Commission, Employment Equality guidance). Vacancies shared through the programme should be genuine employer-direct roles rather than passed to third-party aggregators. This is context, not legal advice.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story. An Irish employability programme working with long-term unemployed jobseekers stands up a branded board and invites each new intake on day one. Coaches watch an employer-direct feed match participants to live, still-open roles in the region, and see applications and interviews per cohort. When the funder asks for outcomes, the team exports job landings by cohort instead of compiling attendance and workshop counts.
With cohort-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, applications, interviews and job landings by cohort, so you report progression to work rather than attendance and workshop hours.
From an employer-direct job stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each participant's skills, seniority and location. Vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
Yes. Your participants get a private, branded board that carries your programme's identity rather than a generic job site.
Yes. You can invite employer partners to post vacancies to your programme's board or to view your talent pool, keeping opportunities inside the programme.
No. Right-to-work verification stays with the hiring employer. Spacewalk connects participants to live vacancies and tracks their progress into work.
Participant data is held to enable the service and produce outcome reports, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 under the oversight of the Data Protection Commission. Participants can exercise their access, rectification and erasure rights in the usual way.
Spacewalk supports employability programmes internationally, including employability programme software for UK providers, branded job boards for Australian employability programs and employability programme platforms for New Zealand providers.
Explore Spacewalk for Irish outplacement providers, Irish university careers services, Irish professional associations and Irish summer school programmes.
