Over a thousand jobseekers will start a crash course in getting work today as part of a new effort to get young people off the dole.

'Skills for Work Week' will see big name brands in the grocery industry, like Tesco and Nestlé, offer free training sessions.

There are currently 50,000 young people signing on in this country.

And the Department of Social Protection has chosen 12-hundred of them to benefit from the workshops which will take place on site at the companies' bases.

Declan Carolan is the General Manager of business group ECR Ireland who's helping to run the week - he explains what they'll be focusing on:

Last week, the CSO reported that unemployment fell by almost 16 percent in 2014 with 213,600 people out of work by the end of the year, falling to its lowest level since 2008.

That means an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent at the end of 2014 – with 39,000 less unemployed in Ireland across the year.

The Central Statistics Office published its Quarterly National Household Survey for the last quarter of 2014 – which also shows a 1.5 percent growth in the number of people working.