“Romania has become the second largest subsidiary of Oracle after the United Kingdom in the EMEA region. Why was Romania chosen? Other than what people think, that it provides a good cost/labor efficiency ratio, Oracle came to Romania because it chose a country with a developing economy, with a really well educated workforce,” Mindrutescu said.
“People are complaining about the education system, but I beg to differ. I have almost 100 expats working in Romania, but the real value comes from the other employees, the Romanians,” said Sorin Mindrutescu at an event organized by Romania’s central bank, BNR, for which he used to work in the past.
Mindrutescu says while he had regional duties with Oracle (four and a half years) he realized Romania was “two laps ahead of the others” in terms of education, because, even though Oracle is an US company with extremely strict procedures “our imagination is used in constructive ways.”
Mindrutescu’s statement contradicts the prevailing trend of the last few years when HR managers and heads of companies, some of them working in the IT sector, have been complaining about the dwindling quality of college graduates.
For instance, Grigoriada Stroe, HR manager of game publisher Ubisoft, told ZF in an interview that universities are not offering students a curriculum suitable for working in this industry, which creates a “deficit” that cannot be corrected by training companies, and therefore training has to be done in-house with experienced employees. Taking a newly recruited employee to an intermediate level of required skill takes one to two years.
Oracle has been conducting an educational program in Romania in partnership with the Education Ministry, already attended by tens of thousands of students. The company also successfully got the Ministry to include Java technology, which the labor market requires, in the curriculum of the computer science high schools.
“Had we not had the quality of people and the results of the Romanian education system, there wouldn’t have been as many investments in Romania. We increased the number of employees and we’ve now got 27 foreign languages spoken at native speaker level in the offices in Bucharest. We do financial data centralizing and salary payment in Bucharest, tens of thousands of people throughout the entire world get paid from Bucharest,” Mindrutescu said.
According to a recent announcement of the government that Oracle has yet to confirm, the company will invest about EUR100 million to expand local business soon.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)