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Brno companies hunt for tech workers

Short on skilled employees, firms tap college students

July 2nd, 2008 issue

By Michelle Dobrovolny

For the Post

BRNO, SOUTH MORAVIA

Skilled workers are in short supply across the country, but perhaps nowhere is the labor shortage more threatening than here in quickly growing Brno, which has been challenging Prague for leadership in the high-tech sector.
“The labor situation in the IT sector here is problematic. Companies will need 1,000 people and there will be just 300,” said Petr Ludwig, founder and director of LifeWeb Group, a small, Brno-based start-up.
Ludwig has so far managed to ease his labor woes by headhunting IT students at local universities before they graduate. Nearly all of the 40 employees in LifeWeb’s offices are students finishing their studies.
Yet, as IT companies here continue to expand — including IBM, which opened a new facility at the Czech Technology Park earlier this month — Ludwig is becoming concerned that even this labor pool will dry up.
“I was discussing this problem with some managers of German IT companies,” he said, “and they told me that [in Germany] normally it’s the big companies that take all the good people from universities before they finish.
“Here, nowadays, it’s not quite like that. But I think that this is coming, and when the big companies start taking people from their studies and offering them jobs, then we won’t have the opportunity to have students as workers.”
This comes despite growing student numbers at the IT faculties of the Brno University of Technology and Masaryk University, which registered a combined 5,000 students this past school year. It’s a dramatic increase from 10 years ago, when the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University was established with 40 first-year students.
Even this increased number can barely keep up with the demand, as technology companies compete to grab the best students. More than 50 percent of the students are already working in their field before they graduate, according to Jiří Zlatuška, who teaches IT-related courses at Masaryk.
 “It is an anomaly within the universities,” Zlatuška said. “Someone remarked once that it is strange that we don’t devote any time to finding job opportunities for our graduates — but we actually don’t have to because there is so much hunger for our graduates.”
IBM, for its part, has taken some initiative to address the shortage by collaborating with universities and running courses at both Brno IT faculties. Since starting two years ago, the programs have turned out an additional 200 IT workers of varied specializations, from programmers to technicians.
“This partnership has worked very well,” said Chris Sciacca, IBM’s strategic communications manager in Brno. “Brno has excellent universities and they are very open to collaborating with corporations.”  
However, considering the growth of IBM’s operations in this city — from about 1,000 employees when it opened two years ago to the present 2,400 — a couple hundred new workers only slightly eases the strain on the market.
IBM has also had to compensate for the lack of local skilled labor by bringing in IT workers from abroad, though the company refuses to say exactly what proportion of its workforce here is foreign, saying only that its Brno offices employ 70 different nationalities.
The exact extent of the labor shortage in the IT sector is impossible to define, as the City of Brno lumps statistics for IT firms into a broader category comprising any kind of research- or science-based industry.
Considering the boom the industry has seen over the past decade — with some 1 billion Kč ($65 million) poured into the city’s major IT projects since 2000, according to Czech Invest — there is little doubt that the current labor crisis is here and is a threat to the continuing growth of the industry.
For smaller companies like LifeWeb, which lack the resources to bring in a fleet of foreign workers, the situation in Brno is looking increasingly bleak.
“We’re growing really fast. We employ 40 people right now, but tomorrow it could be 45,” said Ludwig. “So you do start to look elsewhere. India has a lot of potential IT workers. They have 10 million IT graduates every year — that’s a lot of people.”
Michelle Dobrovolny can be reached at business@praguepost.com


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