According to the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP), Ireland's ranking in the table is an indication of the lack of investment in workplace learning in this country . . . a situation that is putting Ireland's buoyant economy at serious risk.

"It's a really shocking statistic, " Lucy Fallon-Byrne, director of the NCPP, told the Sunday Tribune. "In terms of sustaining our prosperity, no matter what way you look at this in terms of statistics, we fare very badly as a country."

Fallon-Byrne was speaking ahead of a major NCPP conference in Dublin tomorrow, at which delegates will hear that the Irish economy is being jeopardised by Irish employers' inability to appreciate the link between workplace learning and profitability.

The NCPP says that less than half of Irish companies offer employees learning opportunities, despite extensive research showing that good human resources adds 50,000 per employee to a company's turnover.

"The race is on to become a 'knowledge economy', " said Fallon-Byrne. "In the next 10 years, we are going to have to be competing for investment with countries like Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden.

But all of those countries topped the OECD league tables, while we're down at the bottom with the Czech Republic. If we don't do this now, the people in the workplace in 10 years' time simply will not have the skills to compete."