UK
It’s not just Polish plumbers flocking to these shores, London’s investment banks are increasingly turning to Eastern Europe, and particularly Poland, for IT professionals.
“It has been happening for a while but definitely has picked up over the past year,” says Robert Lycett, banking technology consultant at headhunter Astbury Marsden.
“You get a lot of developers, a lot of C++ or C# developers, rather than, say, business analysts. They will often be pretty highly skilled and go into good jobs,” he points out.
“Most of the banks are happy to move people over here,” agrees Stephen Feline, consultant at The Kaizen Partnership.
Just as the French have a reputation for making good quants, so Poles, along with Russians, are becoming well-known for their technical and mathematical nous, he adds.
“They tend to be good at the analytical stuff. You will often get them ending up on the trading desk. You see quite prominent people from Eastern Europe there now,” he suggests.
Given the concentration of IT talent in Eastern Europe, banks are also, unsurprisingly, looking at the viability of shifting IT operations eastwards. Though less pronounced as a trend, there’s already evidence of this starting to happen. UBS, for instance, has said it plans to relocate 250 administrative jobs to Poland, while Citigroup is reportedly set to move some of its legal functions to the country as part of a global plan to offshore 9,500 jobs to cheaper locations.
Great that’ll bring the rates down, like every other trade the people have been brought in todo…why as this current party did away with apprenticeships.
I’ve been in the I.T./Telecom trade for 12 years and have perpetually had to battle with cheap foreign labour, pay cuts and instability and as a contractor, usually the blame when incompetent F/T employees screw up. We have to sort that out aswell.
Like we really need more migrants here.
No wonder so much of our expertise has emmigtrated, I might just join them…
Of course I could do an M.C.S.E or CCNA, with no gurantee of a job, afterwards as I don’t have five years experience and the capacity to work for less than 25.000 p/a.
Employers have had it far to good, for far to long in this country, the looming economic dowturn will teach a few people a lesson, that weren’t around to witness the last recession.
As a contractor I tell you the market is suffering already, I bear witness to that.