Garth Gilmour plays a key role in keeping Liberty IT's engineers ahead of the curve, leading training programmes, internal tech events, and community outreach to help shape the next generation of talent.
Drawing from his software development background, Garth now focuses on education, helping developers build skills that keep pace with a fast-changing industry. He's convinced that strong coding fundamentals never go out of style, even in an AI-driven world.
He recently sat down with Sync NI to share his thoughts on AI, career growth, and the future of tech.
How would you best describe your role and responsibilities as a Learning Consultant at Liberty IT?
Liberty IT has over 800 team members across the island of Ireland and three offices in Belfast, Dublin and Galway. A large number of employees are actively involved in software engineering, a craft which reinvents itself every 5-10 years. Within the Learning & Development team we help all these folks keep their skills on the leading edge, from the day they start with us.
As a Learning Consultant, my main role is to keep all our technical training programmes under review. Mostly I work with our training partners to ensure ongoing programmes are relevant and contemporary, and to commission new programs as required.
I help organise internal events (such as our TechCon conference and Ignite hackathon), coach folks intending to present at conferences, and deliver internal workshops. Last but not least I’m an active member of our STEM employee resource group, where I deliver guest lectures at universities, and am an organiser of several local conferences, for which I’m very grateful. This is an important part of my role as it enables me to help inspire the tech talent of the future, something which Liberty IT is very passionate about.
What motivated you to teach rather than directly apply your skills in software development?
Teaching is directly applying your skills! Educators, advocates, and consultants are continuously writing code. From small programs that illuminate a key technical point to complete applications that serve as exemplars of an architectural style.
Most software engineers spend a majority of their time engaging with stakeholders, understanding requirements and reviewing existing code, so an educator frequently writes more code in any given day than a full time developer, simply because they have more room to manoeuvre.
How does AI impact the software development sector and can it really replace humans?
My answer to that will be out of date by the time it is printed! GenAI is revolutionising the software industry by enabling experienced developers to become more productive and junior developers to upskill faster. Soon Agentic AI will enable virtual assistants to join software teams. These are all tremendously positive advances which should be celebrated.
However, we must never forget the most important language model to train is the one between your ears. Students may never gain the deep understanding of coding that lets them debug complex issues. Prompt engineering may effortlessly take projects to 80% completion but then stall progress. Virtual team members may carry out actions that have unintended consequences. We need to ensure there is always a human in the loop to guard against these issues.
Continual learning and development is a crucial element in software development, what aspect of coding is evolving at the greatest speed?
Ironically the most rapidly evolving aspect of coding is convergence. The past few decades saw an era of ‘polyglot programming’ when many different programming languages were created, and multiple coding styles were explored. We’re now in a period of consolidation, where industry has decided what features are essential to a modern programming language, and these features are being added to all popular languages. For developers the distance between the language you most love, and the one you most hate, is a lot less than it used to be.
There are numerous Tech events and conferences throughout the calendar year for developers, what are your personal favourites and why?
I’m personally involved in Northern Ireland Developers Conference (NIDC), ServerlessDays Belfast and Liberty IT’s internal employee conference, TechCon. I also have huge respect for Women Techmakers Belfast, BSides Belfast, ProductTank Belfast, Google Developer Groups Belfast and the AWS Community Day.
All of these events take diversity extremely seriously and are great events to deliver your inaugural talk. If you’re thinking about it, please contact me and I’ll hook you up with the right folks. Also, if you’re attending Queens University, ElevateNI is a great event to participate in.
Coding often has a reputation for being not as exciting as other career paths among younger audiences, how can the industry dispel this myth?
There’s a Japanese saying I like - “amateurs play, professionals toil”. There are many different career paths in tech, but ultimately coding is the bone and marrow of our art. Time spent learning about coding, testing, building, and deploying software is never wasted. It may not be as exciting as the current ‘shiny thing’, but it never goes out of style. Even in a world of Generative AI. Strong coding skills are a strong foundation on which you can build a successful and long-lasting career in software engineering.
Is it ever too late to learn, or can anyone forge a successful career in tech?
As far as I know there are no barriers to learning new skills at any age. When it comes to tech all the educational resources you might need are available online, and the average laptop is powerful enough to let you create all kinds of applications. This is a tremendous improvement compared to when I started in the 1990’s. Of course, our contemporary western culture is biased in all kinds of ways and fixated with youth. So, the popular belief persists that software engineering is a young person’s game. But if you can get past that then there’s nothing to stop you!
Sync NI's Summer 2025 magazine celebrates women in tech across Ireland as we continue to encourage more women to enter the thriving sector and address the current gender imbalance. Read the Summer 2025 Sync NI Magazine online for free here.
