IDA Ireland |

Are you passionate about making a difference? Would you like to make a positive impact on the Irish Economy?

At IDA Ireland, we’re passionate about making a difference too. As Ireland's inward promotion agency, we help established foreign-owned companies to land and expand across the country. We work with a portfolio of over 1,500 companies from different industry sectors to help bring jobs to Ireland. Currently, over 450,000 people are employed either directly or indirectly by our client companies, meaning that for every 10 jobs created by Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Ireland, 8 more jobs are generated in the wider economy - this is the impact we are dedicated to creating.

To help us continue to achieve our goals, we embrace our values every day; People, Professionalism, Passion for Performance & Achievement, and Public Service. So, if you would like to be a part of an ambitious and committed team that makes an impact on the future of Ireland, the IDA Ireland Graduate Programme is the place for you!

Why the IDA Graduate Programme

The IDA Graduate Programme provides recent graduates from diverse academic backgrounds the opportunity to kickstart their careers in a dynamic and rewarding environment.

Our unique three-year program affords graduates the opportunity to get involved from day one. Successful graduates will spend four nine-month rotations working different departments in the organisation. Graduates will spend time working in broad spectrum, cross-sectoral roles. These will range from client-facing positions in our Dublin HQ, regional locations or overseas offices, alongside business support roles. Each role provides opportunities for graduates to showcase their skillset and help IDA Ireland to attract and retain Foreign Direct Investment.

The Organisation devotes significant resources to graduates’ continuous development over the three years. Support is offered every step of the way, including in the form of a mentor and a graduate buddy.

Graduates are provided with a range of opportunities to attend training designed by our Learning and Development team, and tuition aid is available for those who wish to further their education. To accompany this development, graduates will gain significant hands-on experience through collaboration with colleagues across several business functions both in Ireland and overseas.

The programme allows for significant graduate input across the three years. In tandem with the continuous development opportunities provided by IDA, this enables successful graduates to grow into their roles and realise their potential, with many graduates seeing the end of the programme culminate in a permanent role.

IDA’s most important asset is its people; that is why we aim to continuously develop and support our colleagues. Working at IDA Ireland will give you the opportunity to kickstart your career while also developing your skillset, and we will offer any assistance we can in helping you to reach your full potential.

As part of the IDA team, you will work closely with multinational companies to establish or expand their Irish operations. You will take part in four nine-month rotations – as part of our regional, sectoral, overseas, and corporate support teams – and will gain first-hand experience across all aspects of the Foreign Direct Investment conversion process. You will have the opportunity to meet and talk with various colleagues from across IDA’s different divisions while also receiving regular opportunities to network with key stakeholders both in Ireland and abroad. 

The work you will do is dynamic and varied. Your responsibilities will include business analysis, market research, content creation, project management, and client visit planning and execution. In your regional and divisional rotations, there will be opportunities to travel to different locations within Ireland as part of site visits and stakeholder engagement meetings. You will partake in in-house training in relation to both business and interpersonal skills and will be provided with the opportunity to avail of foreign language courses. You will also receive structured mentorship from IDA management and will have a specifically assigned Graduate Buddy to support you throughout the programme. 

We aim to give our graduates a fully rounded experience, therefore you will also support projects outside of your main role. Volunteer work is a priority in IDA, and you will closely with the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team, Corporate Social Responsibility team, and our organisation-wide Meet Up team – who arrange information sessions for employees on topical issues and subjects of interest with external subject matter experts – to ensure you get a 360-degree view of all that the organisation has to offer. By the end of the three-year programme, you will have worked across multi-sector projects in Ireland and overseas, which will have allowed you to build a valuable internal and external network and to strongly develop both your business acumen and soft skills.

In IDA Ireland we are pride ourselves on fostering a culture of continuous growth and improvement. We are committed to and invest in maintaining our culture of learning across the organisation. We recognize that the backbone of our success are our people and therefore we make it our priority to enhance our team's skills and knowledge. 

Our learning strategy is for everyone in the organisation to have a continuous personal development plan which will be in line with their unique personal growth ambitions. We provide learning solutions for all through the “IDA Learning Academy”.  We adopt an approach to learning which focuses on “The 3 Es of learning” to Education, Exposure to others and Experience. 

We provide an array of learning solutions: bite sized virtual and in person, short and long learning programmes and peer learning workshops. The programmes range from self-directed, and tutor facilitated.  We support people to continue with formal language learning and formal education through our ‘tuition aid’ programme. 

To bring breadth to your learning experience, we provide opportunities to take part in projects and to join working groups that add value to the organisation such as our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Sports & Social teams.

Our passion and dedication to our learning culture not only fuels our competitive edge but also empowers our employees to achieve their fullest potential.

IDA Ireland is firmly committed to promoting and advocating Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) in the workplace. We seek to create an inclusive environment for everyone we come in contact with, from clients to team members across Ireland and the globe. We all have different backgrounds and lived experiences. And how we celebrate our collective experiences and unique life stories is what makes IDA a phenomenal place to work. 

We passionately uphold six unique pillars in EDI at IDA: Disability, Gender, LGBTQ+, Multicultural, Neurodiversity, and Social Mobility. Our Core EDI Team is comprised of six Pillar Leads who represent a cross-organisational mix of age, gender, seniority, location, and background. In addition, we have an EDI Lead who unites these focus areas through an intersectional lens. We also have a range of volunteers who help us craft events, information sessions, policy reviews and various other activities to bring these focus areas to life. 

We believe in “Nothing about us without us” – so there are numerous ways for you to lend your voice in the evolution of IDA’s growing culture. Throughout our current EDI strategy, the EDI Action Plan 2021-2024, we have held surveys, focus groups, information sessions, formal trainings and speaker events to help us understand how diversity shows up in the workplace and how we can foster inclusion in our day-to-day. We’re constantly seeking to better understand this rapidly evolving space and your voice can help us keep growing. 

In 2023, IDA was awarded Public Sector Organisation of the Year at the inaugural National Diversity and Inclusion Awards (NDIA). This year (2024), we are sponsoring the Advancing Social Inclusion category at the NDIA. You can watch our sponsor video here to find out more. 

In January 2024 we the first Public Sector Organisation to receive the Investors in Diversity Gold accreditation. Investors in Diversity Gold from the Irish Centre for Diversity (ICD) measures the result of embedded D&I, and how that influences the “lived experience” of employees in a positive way. Gold’s purpose is to showcase consistency of practice based on evidence and demonstrated thought leadership within the D&I space. We are the 17th business to receive Gold in Ireland. To have a look at our photos from the announcement, you check out IDA’s LinkedIn Page here.

A few words from our CEO, Michael Lohan, on EDI in IDA: 

“[Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] doesn’t come without effort and work from everyone. We’re very fortunate to have a brilliant EDI Team spearheading this work, but everyone in IDA takes ownership and displays leadership when it comes to EDI. Everyone is part of this journey. It is so important to reflect on how we want to be treated individually and also how others want to be treated. We all bring different forms of diversity to IDA – coming from different backgrounds across Ireland and the globe. How we melt all those experiences together is so important. It’s an honour to be part of an organisation where you can see not only how you grow as a person, but more importantly how you grow from others and learn from them. To my mind, that is what makes IDA one of the best places I’ve ever worked in. We always have a journey, and this journey doesn’t end. The key now is to keep ourselves in that Gold position and continue to do the right things in the right way.”