At least 100 new people will be joining Ubisoft Romania, which has more than 1,200 employees in its offices in Bucharest and Craiova.
“We’ve recruited more than 200 people for game development, IT and testing department, with a focus on programming and testing over the past year. This year we will keep the constant growth of 10% of the last few years, and will continue to focus on programming and testing jobs,” says Grigoriada Stroe, human resources manager of Ubisoft Romania.
She has been supervising the human resources operations of Ubisoft Romania for more than three and a half years.
The ‘battle’ over skills, especially in the IT and gaming industries is becoming fiercer, Stroe says, as the government made available funding schemes for companies in these industries to help them create jobs, but the number of graduates remains low.
Universities offering IT degrees turn out up to 6,000 graduates every year and the number of experts in this field does not look like it will increase in the coming years, since the Automatic Control and Computer Science School with the University Politechnica of Bucharest, for instance, has been unable to enroll more than 700 new students a year for over a decade.
This is the largest IT skill ‘factory’ in Romania and it cannot enroll more students because of the lack of space, a problem that will be fixed next year once construction of a new building has been completed.
”The supply of jobs has increased because of the financing schemes offered by the government for the creation of new IT industry jobs lately, as well as because of the fast-paced development of the gaming sector. Unfortunately, the number of specialists in the field is not rising as fast, and the curricula of the universities is not adjusting at the same pace,” Grigoriada Stroe explains.
Ubisoft Romania posted more than EUR27 million revenue in 2013, an increase of over 20% on 2012, according to Finance Ministry data.
The largest companies with video and mobile game development operations in Romania include Gameloft, Electronic Arts and King.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)