|
 A growing number of employers are facing such travails since about
half a million of Hungary's 10 million people left for better paid
jobs in western Europe, with ramifications for economic growth,
competitiveness and investor appeal.
Engineers are in particularly short supply. Companies resort to
poaching workers from rivals, at greater cost, or invest time and
money to bring their own workers up to speed.
For Timea Kalina, Human Resources Manager at TUV Rheinland's
Hungarian unit, losing experienced colleagues is a big problem.
"If we want to recruit a replacement who can fill the role
flawlessly from day one, that is difficult right now," she said. "I
would say the chances of finding someone like that are zero."
On average, it takes TUV Rheinland two or three months to recruit an
engineer, longer for more specialized positions or if management
skills are also required.
Engineering is just the start of the problem.
A recent survey of 750 employers by staffing company Manpower Group
found that nearly one in two have trouble finding enough skilled
workers to fill vacancies from blue-collar jobs to drivers, IT
experts and accountants.
Doctors, who have created the most visible gap due to abundant media
coverage in Hungary, rank seventh on the list.
Vodafone <VOD.L> and International Business Machines Corp <IBM.N>
are among a string of global companies to have chosen Hungary in
centralizing services for employees and customers. Some of those
companies are now finding it hard to recruit.
"In local shared service centers there is a shortage of several
thousand workers," said Laszlo Dalanyi, Country Manager for Hungary
and Slovenia at Manpower Group. "In the information technology
sector there are 20,000 empty jobs and the gap in the car sector has
also reached tens of thousands by now."
He said Hungary, which has walled itself off from the hundreds of
thousands of migrants pouring into Europe from the Middle East and
Asia, has yet to find a way to hold onto its top talent or keep new
graduates from leaving in droves.
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
Hungary's jobless rate has fallen substantially in recent years,
sinking to 6.4 percent by September from double-digit figures when
Prime Minister Viktor Orban took power in 2010 with a sweeping
mandate for reform after eight years of Socialist rule that saw the
country pulled back from the brink with an international bailout.
But the unemployment figure has been partly pushed down by 226,600
mostly unskilled people employed in public works programs, a
fraction of whom find employment in the private sector, as well as
114,200 people registered as working abroad.
Analyst Mariann Trippon at CIB Bank, the Hungarian unit of Intesa
SanPaolo, said most of the improvement in jobless figures came from
these two factors and the unemployment rate adjusted for the impact
of public works programs remained above 11 percent.
"A shortage of workers can have serious consequences in the long
run," she said. "One of the key challenges of Hungarian economic
policy is to boost potential growth and that would also require
tackling the structural problems of the labor market."
The problems include a sizeable grey economy, a lack of appropriate
skills and low internal mobility.
For the first time in a decade, Deloitte Consulting has launched a
billboard campaign aimed at university students and career starters
in Budapest. Jobs advertised on its local website include IT
engineers, accountants and finance experts.
[to top of second column] |
Lajos Antal, head of Cyber Risk Services in Hungary and Central
Europe, said only a major overhaul of the education system from
primary school to master's degree would solve the problems long
term.
"We need to devote significantly more resources into finding the
right people, casting a wider net, look around across the border and
even hire from abroad," he said.
SKILLS GAP
One of the most frequent complaints is a lack of hands-on training
at universities, but a 2012 skills survey by the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed Hungarian
schoolchildren losing ground to their peers in mathematics and
science, despite some improvement in reading.
In all three categories, however, Hungarian pupils scored below the
OECD average.
German premium car maker Audi, one of Hungary's top revenue-earners
and exporters, sponsors an entire department at a university in Gyor,
where it is based, to train engineers. Earlier this year, road
hauliers entered a deal with Orban's government to train 6,000
drivers in Hungary.
"Our surveys indicate that there are at least 20,000 to 22,000
drivers missing in Hungary," said Peter Erdei, a director at the
Hungarian Road Hauliers' Association.
"In our profession, this has become an impediment to growth," he
said. "Trucks stand idle and further investments to buy additional
trucks are not made because companies cannot ensure the required
staff to drive these trucks."
The proximity of richer euro zone neighbor Austria creates an extra
problem in the western regions of Hungary. Erste Bank said in some
cases it took them six months or even a year to find a suitable
candidate for a sales position.
Earlier this year, Orban's government launched a 100 million forint
($353,519.28) program to get 50 young people to return from London,
sometimes referred to as the second-largest Hungarian town for the
number of migrants working there.
The website of the program, which was launched in April, lists four
people in its "Success Stories" section.
"I think it is not primarily about education," Manpower's Dalanyi
said. "It is a lot more about whether Hungary can become attractive
enough for these people to return."
($1 = 282.87 forints)
(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
