zaterdag 18 oktober 2014

Recruitment of engineers in Romania

RECRUITMENT OF ENGINEERS IN ROMANIA
All organizations need to recruit outside personnel from time to time. In doing so, there are mainly two options: DIY (do it yourself) or RPO (recruitment process outsourcing). Choosing one over the other is determined by volumes (how many people needed), by difficulty (how hard to find the people are), by urgency (how fast need positions be filled) or by forecasted risk (what are risks of bad hire?). Generally, recruitment and selection are time consuming, pricey and sometimes risky which is why the support of professionals may be very fruitful.
Today’s shifting business environment requires quick reaction and high flexibility. Usually, businesses use both internal and external flexibility tools which are in most cases related to headcount structure, employment relations, working time and salary levels. In this respect, organizations may apply the regular internal employer-employee flexibility tools or they can turn towards the multiple external flexibility tools available and compliant with the legislation in force. 
The number of multinational firms operating in Romania is increasing and there are opportunities in the major cities for highly-skilled graduates.
The Romanian economy is seeing a slow but steady recovery following the global economic crisis but is still susceptible to shocks. With the increase in multinational firms operating in Romania, graduate jobs are available in cities such as Bucharest for graduates with language skills. There's a demand for fluency in certain languages including English, French and German, although speaking the local language is important for a normal life. Graduates with specialist skills and experience are most likely to succeed in the job market.

Where can you work?
  • Major industries: electric machinery and equipment, textiles and footwear, light machinery and auto assembly, energy, crude oil processing, metals and metal products, chemicals, minerals, construction materials, food processing, agricultural products.
  • Recent growth areas: the government is opening up sectors such as energy and telecoms to competition and investment.


Civil engineering graduates are welcome on general engineering schemes and in sectors such as financial management, but every year most choose to pursue their careers in the construction industry. Graduates typically apply for a civil or structural engineering job in a particular specialism or industry. Larger employers usually hire graduates into a specialist division or business, while smaller organizations often focus on one or two specialists in total. Whichever sector you choose, however, the nature of the job will differ depending on the type of employer you work for.

Most civil and structural engineers work for either a consultancy or a contractor.

  • Consultants are involved with a project from the outset and work closely with the client, often managing the project on their behalf. Civil and structural engineers at consultancies are responsible for designing structures. Once building begins they help to resolve any design-related difficulties but, apart from the occasional visit to the site, are largely office-based.
  • Contractors, meanwhile, actually build the project once the designs are finalized. They may contract out some work to specialist subcontractors, but they are responsible for the construction process and based on site. Civil and structural engineers at contractors manage teams and oversee the implementation of designs.

Starting out at a consultancy, you might assist with designs or gather data under the supervision of a team leader. Working for a contractor, you would start out by managing a small section of the project or ‘package’ on site. Recruiters will expect you to know the difference between consultancies and contractors and have considered reasons for applying to their type of organization.
There are also some graduate jobs with very specialist contractors. For example, in coastal and marine, there are companies specializing in dredging and reclamation, off-shore installations and specialist shipping.
In some industry sectors, including water and rail, you can work for client organizations (such as Network Rail, a water supply company or a local authority), often in a design-based or project management role.
As engineering employers only hire into areas where they have a pipeline of projects in place, you’ll find more vacancies in the areas that have been less affected by the recent economic troubles. These include the energy and power sectors, rail, and water and public health. However, it’s worth investigating how individual employers are performing in different specializes; even parts of the industry that are suffering overall may have a handful of firms that are managing to turn a profit.

The main industries or specialisms you could work in are:
  • Airports: Typical projects involve modifying existing airports, including the runways and taxiways (‘airside infrastructure’), maintenance and cargo facilities (‘airside support services’), and terminal buildings.
  • Bridges: Engineers need a strong understanding of structural engineering and the ability to work closely with highways, geotechnical, railway and environmental engineers. In addition to contractors and consultants, specialist structural organizations are involved in the superstructure design. Geotechnical engineers advise on the substructure and foundations. Specialist subcontractors and suppliers focus on areas such as bearings or post-tensioning. Typical clients include the Highways Agency, Network Rail and local authorities.
  • Buildings: Sustainability is often a key consideration. Civil engineers work with building services engineers and other specialists to ensure buildings are designed with climate change in mind and to meet ever-evolving regulations.
  • Coastal and marine: Projects focus on protecting coastal communities against rising sea levels and erosion using sea defenses – both hard defenses, constructed from concrete, for example, and soft defenses, which involve man-made or reconstructed beaches. Engineers may also be involved in building and maintaining ports, offshore wind farms and structures to harness tidal energy.
  • Energy and power: Engineers design and build the infrastructure needed to create energy. Graduates could work on projects such as the designs for an offshore wind facility, the maintenance of an oil platform or the decommissioning of an old nuclear power plant.
  • Environmental: Engineers can become environmental consultants, a role in which they will ascertain and then reduce the impacts of a proposed project on the environment. They can specialize in specific areas, such as flood risk.
  • Geotechnical: In this specialist area, engineers are responsible for the foundations of structures. They assess field data about the ground, soil, rock and boreholes, and find ways to make sure that foundations or slopes are safe and stable. They could specialize in completing site investigations, designing foundations or overseeing the on-site construction work. Specialist postgraduate study is often advantageous.
  • Highways: This job involves overseeing temporary works and permanent works and finding ways to ease traffic congestion, lessen environmental impact and improve road safety.
  • Offshore: This sector is concerned with the safe and profitable development of hydrocarbon resources. Engineers undertake the design and installation of oil production platforms, sub-sea structures, pipelines, permanent and temporary anchorages, and assessments of seabed stability. This can involve conceptual and feasibility studies, site assessments, design of foundations and structures, installation supervision and operational management. Projects can be in isolated locations.
  • Rail: Engineers use their technical knowledge to design, build and maintain the railway system’s infrastructure, including tracks, earthworks and drainage, and telecoms and power. Cost is a particular consideration for engineers in this sector.
  • Tunneling: This area chiefly calls on specialist structural and geotechnical knowledge but can also involve many elements of underground engineering – rock tunnels, shafts, caverns and stations, for example, may come under the remit of a tunneling engineer. Engineers also take decisions on a project’s viability in terms of safety, location and cost, and ensure it has a limited impact on the environment and any buildings nearby.
  • Water and public health: The ultimate objective of these projects is to provide clean drinking water and treat wastewater. Engineers might be involved in implementing sustainable water drainage systems, creating energy-efficient treatment plants or improving infrastructure to prevent urban flooding.


NEAR SHORING IN ROMANIA FOR ICT

Near-shoring is a form of off-shoring where the destination country is nearer to the home office then would be the case in the more traditional form of off-shoring. The definitions of off-shoring and near-shoring are:
  • Off-shoring is defined as the movement of a business process done at a company in one country to the same or another company in another, different country. Almost always work is moved because of a lower cost of operations in the new location.
  • Near-shoring is "the transfer of business or IT processes to the same or another company in a nearby country, often sharing a border with your own country", where both parties expect to benefit from one or more of the following dimensions of proximity: geographic, temporal (time zone), cultural, linguistic, economic, political, or historical linkages. The service work that is being sourced may be a business process or software development.

In general the decision to move part of a business abroad is based on one or several of the arguments mentioned below:
  • Opportunities for running a business at reduced costs, because the destination country can provide raw materials, services or labor at lower costs than the home country;
  • Access to the local marketplace for the products produced by the company;
  • Taking benefit of particular skilled labor, not (sufficiently) available in home country;
  • Production of product with an expiration date close to the marketplace;
  • The destination country's location is favorable in the sense that it can act as a logistic hub for a new market;
  • Companies that want to go abroad should have a thorough understanding of why they want to do so, because these reasons will be the driver for their consequential decisions: near-shoring or off-shoring, set up an own branch or a company or find a local partner, etc. These topics are further addressed in this chapter.

Off-shoring is the move of a supportive or primary business service outside the home country. In the past decade off-shoring has become equivalent with moving jobs to the Far East, especially in the production of goods and the IT sector. The biggest perceived benefit of moving services to the Far East is a reduction in costs.
The main benefits of off-shoring are:
  • Cost savings
  • Access to a new market
  • An attractive labor market
  •  Can help to fulfill offset obligations.

Near-shoring is very similar to off-shoring, except for the distance (both in physical distance as well as cultural distance) between the home and destination country.
The idea behind near-shoring is that it provides a more sustainable business climate because it offers the same benefits as off-shoring with fewer drawbacks. The main benefits of near-shoring are:
  • Cost savings
  • Access to a new market
  • An attractive labor market
  • Closer communication and cooperation between the companies involved Corporate Social

Responsibility (CSR) considerations.
Compared to off-shoring, the following downsides can still be present for near-shoring and should be looked at by companies that consider near-shoring:
  • Infrastructure of the destination county
  • Governance of the out-of-country branch or partner
  • Inefficient communications
  • Expenses related to travel

Romania is an attractive near-shoring destination due to the high level of technical and language skills of IT workers, its well-developed IT industry and availability of a vast IT labor pool. The ITC market value was €7bn in 2011. Romania has more than 8.000 software and IT service companies, meaning that 23% of the active workforce is employed in science and technology.
Internationally acknowledged talent pool
  • European leader and 6th in the world by number of certified IT specialists;
  • First in EU with regards to the total number of Computer Science and Mathematics Olympiad medals earned, third worldwide after Russia and China;
  • Around 9,000 computer science graduates/year, high percentage of manpower in advanced R&D.

Competitive advantages
STRENGTH
  • highly skilled labor force;
  • highly competitive labor costs;
  • strong tradition of Technical Expertise;
  • exceptional geographic location;
  • foreign languages proficiency;
  • stable business environment;
  • western European business mentality, behavior and work culture;
  • availability of IT infrastructure: telecommunication lines, hi-speed internet, mobile broadband;

OPPORTUNITIES
  • 90% of the software development companies have experience on near-shoring and outsourcing market;
  • Investment support of foreign investments;
  • Attractive taxation (flat income tax 16%);
  • Tax incentives development engineers;
  • Availability of EU structural funds, which can be used for R&D and training;
  • Project management expertise.

Employment
It is relatively easy to hire well-educated and well-trained employees in Romania; the Romanian education system focuses on theoretical knowledge, thus employees have a
solid background they can build on during their career; especially compared to the surrounding countries, Romanians have excellent language skills. All educated persons speak English. If needed it is relatively easy to find people that speak Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Hungarian; the job market in Romania is lively, so when a vacancy is announced there is usually a lot of response. This enables a company to build up a team of substantial size quickly; the wages in Romania are lower; in 2012 the net wages in Romania were the equivalent of 25-75% of those in the Netherlands, depending on the industry and the employee's qualification.
Romania is part of the EU and NATO. There is a big and active international business community in Romania, which makes it easy o get support. Office space and other local expenses are cheaper than in other countries. Internet connection: Romania ranks top in Europe when it comes to internet speed.
The development technologies that should be used play an important role in the selection criteria for a near-shoring partner. Many companies, particularly the smaller ones, focus on a certain platform and/or development technology, e.g. Microsoft Windows or Linux environments. Your prospective partner should have ample experience with the required technologies and be prepared to work with them. There is a tendency among certain communities (especially the younger IT staff) to always want to use the newest tools and technologies. This can contradict with the interests of the customer, who often is dealing with legacy systems and cannot always keep all its projects updated at all times.
Due to the major influence and training by western companies as well as the western management in the ITC industry, the Romanian ITC workers are significantly more visionary, creative and independent than the average Romanian workers.
Romania’s density of software graduates per thousand inhabitants is significantly higher than in USA, it is five times than in Russia and nearly seven times than of India. The right people can ensure success of the project.

zaterdag 4 oktober 2014

STRUCTURAL FUNDS AND SUBVENTIONS ROMANIA OPERATIONAL PROGRAMMS 2014 2020

STRUCTURAL FUNDS AND SUBVENTIONS FOR ROMANIA PERIOD 2014 2020 - THE MAIN FRAME OF OPERATIONS
For Romania, EU funds will continue to be one of the most important tools to be used to reduce regional disparities and promoting economic growth at regional and local level, strengthening competitiveness and increase employment, benchmarks at the EU level.
It is recognized that these goals fulfilling are possible by providing a favourable environment for investments, by establishing of new companies or developing of the existing ones contributing significantly to the creation of new jobs and generate the added value.
In this context, the use of structural support for the period 2014 - 2020 aims creating conditions for improvement and steady development of business, with the main objectives:
  • Stimulating the competitiveness of enterprises;
  • Facilitating access to finance;
  • Creating an enabling environment to encourage the creation of new businesses and entrepreneurial culture;
  • Supporting companies to operate abroad and to access new markets;
  • Ensuring a skilled and adaptable workforce.

Measures under this challenge will be directed to the following areas:
  • Research, technological development and innovation. The proposed interventions are geared towards supporting innovation in enterprises, as well as capacity building for excellence in research and innovation and for technological changes. In rural areas, innovation and the knowledge base will be strengthened through cooperation between agriculture, food and forestry and other actors, also by creating of clusters and networks and use of consultancy services
  • Information and communications technology. Actions will be aimed at increasing the capacity of companies to have ICT services and encouraging them to use such services.
  • Competitiveness of SMEs, agriculture and fisheries and aquaculture sectors. Efforts will be directed towards supporting investment in entrepreneurship, the commercial exploitation of new ideas and research results by providing business advisory services as well as supporting the development of online tools. Interventions to improve the competitiveness of the agricultural sector will help ensure sustainable food production in the EU and will help to create and preserve jobs and economic growth in rural areas.

An overview of the operational programs and priorities proposed for funding in next period:

Competitiveness Operational Programme
  • Support private investment in research, development and innovation (RDI) and collaborative research between industry and research organizations to encourage transfer of knowledge, technology and personnel with advanced expertise to enable the development of RDI products and services in economic sectors with growth potential;
  • Promoting financial instruments aimed at supporting risk private investment in research and innovation and foster innovative start-ups and spin-offs;
  • Infrastructure development of the private and public research, both as part of the existing / emerging cluster, centres of excellence and other research structures (National / regional / EU) and the specific areas identified as priorities, based on the existence of a potential and / or a competitive advantage, such as health, unlocking the potential for excellence in research and innovation by creating synergies with research, development and innovation of the framework program Horizon 2020 EU;
  • Actions to promote ICT adoption by businesses, including applications and innovation of e-commerce;
  • Actions to develop e-Governance tools for businesses and citizens (e-Government 2.0);
  • Actions for "cloud computing” development.

Regional Operational Programme
  • Actions to strengthen entrepreneurship and option awareness and potential support for business creation;
  • Actions to improve access to finance, including provision of a wide appropriate financial instruments;
  • Actions to improve productivity of SMEs and providing opportunities for growth, including strengthening access to support business planning, technical advice, guidance and support for export;
  • Action to join the network of enterprises to strengthen exchanges knowledge and strengthen their participation in retail chains, including those at the international level;
  • Integrated actions - sites, skills, investment support - in order to attract investment in less developed regions of Romania;
  • Rationalization actions of the regulatory and reducing process of the bureaucratic burden on businesses;
  • Development of technology transfer infrastructure in public and private sectors, especially in less developed regions of Romania, in accordance with the principle of smart specialization.

National Rural Development Programme
  • Creating and providing consulting services to improve economic and environmental performance;
  • Collaboration between agriculture / food industry, forestry, fishing and aquaculture and food industry systems and consulting, education and research context of pilot projects, development of products, practices, processes and new technologies etc.;
  • Establishment of task forces (farmers, researchers, consultants) who will participate at
  • European Innovation Partnership “Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability ";
  • Actions to improve economic performance and restructuring and modernization of agriculture, especially to increase the participation and orientation to markets, and diversify agricultural activities;
  • Facilitating generational renewal in the agricultural sector;
  • Actions to improve economic performance of the primary producers through a better integration of them into the food chain by quality programs, adding value to agricultural products by promoting on local markets through developing short purchasing circuits and setting up of producer groups, etc.;
  • Actions in supporting activities of prevention and risk management in agriculture;
  • Creation of new small businesses by providing support for business start for micro and small enterprises outside the agricultural sector, and activities development of non-agricultural in rural areas.

Maritime and Fisheries Operational Programme
  • Investment in aquaculture: new units, upgrading the existing units, species diversification, improvement the potential aquaculture sites;
  • Promoting new sources of income within the sector (processing activities, marketing) and outside (environmental activities, tourism, education);
  • Investment in fishing ports, shelters, jetties, first sales centres;
  • Improving the working conditions related to health and safety on board inland fisheries and sea;
  • Support for establishment, organization and operation of chain: manufacturers - processors - sellers;
  • Diversify fisheries and aquaculture sector by supporting the creation of new small businesses and create jobs in the area.

A key element in the proper functioning of business and entrepreneurship development is to ensure a skilled and adaptable workforce. Thus it created opportunities for investment in education and training by both  a program dedicated to human capital, and programs for agriculture sector, and fishery and aquaculture sector .

Operational Programme Human Capital
  • Encouraging and facilitating the employers participation in workforce development and lifelong learning;
  • Improved correlation of  both vocational and technical education with labour market needs, ensuring the relevance of the training offer, giving priority to sectors with future potential growth and promoting the partnerships between statement relevant stakeholders;
  • Modernization of tertiary education by developing advanced studies and supporting the internationalization of higher education, including comprehensive research and mobility;

National Rural Development Programme
  • Creating new small businesses by providing support for micro and small enterprise business start from outside the agricultural industry and the development non - agricultural activities in rural areas;
  • Support the training and acquisition of skills in agricultural management, sustainable agriculture practices, improving the quality and using of new technologies specific to agriculture and forestry;
  • Support demonstration activities for the transfer of knowledge about new practices in the field: information, short-term exchanges and visits within the EU in order to promote exchange of good practices, encourage lifelong learning and training in generally in rural areas (in addition to courses or training normally provided in secondary and higher education system), and training in business management and other skills necessary for diversification outside the agriculture sector.

Maritime and Fisheries Operational Programme
  • Diversification of fisheries and aquaculture sector by supporting the creation of new small businesses and creating jobs in the area;
  • Support school infrastructure and resource development in early childhood education and care, from primary, secondary, tertiary to technical and vocational education in order to improve the quality of education and training and its relevance for the labour market.


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