This makes it hard for employers to find suitable candidates who are not already employed.
“The Romanian education system is not helping us, it is not training students for a career in the gaming industry. This is why we have trouble finding senior C++ programmers specializing in this area,” says Grigoriada Stroe, HR manager of Ubisoft Romania.
“We also have trouble finding filling positions like Business Intelligence Developer, Senior Linux Administrator and Net Architect.”
Ubisoft Romania has 1,200 employees and plans to hire 300 more by the end of the year.
“Universities in France, in the entire Western Europe for that matter, offer video gaming courses in colleges. If we look at the US and Canada, the market is even more developed there,” Grigoriada Stroe says.
“Romania has made progress, there are companies getting involved in the academic sector, conducting workshops, offering internships, but at the end of the day it’s us going to the academic sector not the other way round.”
Colleges offering IT degrees turn out about 7,000 graduates a year, which are not enough to meet the demand of Romania’s IT industry, gaming included.
There are about 4,000 to 5,000 employees in Romania’s gaming industry at the moment, most of whom working for big names like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and Gameloft and some for smaller companies like King, whose Bucharest office develops mobile games.
Ubisoft Romania posted more than EUR30 million revenue in Romania last year, an increase of 12.5% on 2013, according to Finance Ministry data.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)