On the other hand, the higher-education profiles most likely to find a job quickly are IT, electrical, computing, electronics, mechanical and civil engineers, which is not surprising considering the development and the exporting potential of the IT industry.
Let us remind that the Serbian market, according to most indicators, lacks around 15,000 IT experts, whereas numerous people of this profile work for foreign companies. In order to compensate for this, the state has started organizing retraining programs within this sector, and this measure is supposed to encompass 1,000 people in 2017.
The first round of training was passed by 100 candidates, and the second cycle is currently being prepared.
Insufficient expertiseAfter 2040, according to some projections, Serbia might lack as many as 100,000 workers, and the dearth of workforce will further be exacerbated by negative demographic trends.
– Fewer people, larger income per capita, regardless of the fact that the total income is either not growing fast or even dropping, is, unfortunately, the nature of the economic and social system in Serbia, and, until this changes, there will be no more people staying here or moving to the country – Vladimir Gligorov, a research fellow of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, says for eKapija.
Our interviewee shares the opinion of those who believe that we have been “harboring illusions” for years (if anyone ever truly had any, he emphasizes) about ours having remarkable experts, top-quality professionals and educated workforce. As he explains, the expertise of the workforce needs to be understood as a comparative advantage, and, in the conditions in which fees for less qualified work are lower in less developed countries and where transportation costs are relatively low, the competitiveness doesn’t lie in wages, but in being qualified.
– For a couple of decades, Serbia has mostly been developing production and services oriented primarily towards the local market, due to which there has been a relative drop in the level of qualification in both the employed and the unemployed. In general, the production and productiveness have dropped, meaning that the qualification has also dropped to adapt to the reduced production and low-production services.
Serbia, Gligorov says, lack entrepreneurs, which can be seen from the data which show a very low rate of local investments, whereas bigger companies, a large number of which is state-owned, lack both managers and experts.