It is well known that the Romanian Construction market is facing in the last years a crisis in terms of qualified and unqualified workforce. The main causes of this issue stands in low wages, the professionals’ migration to the Western Europe countries where the salary levels in construction are much more higher than in our country and of course, the absence of vocational schools that could form the new generations of construction workers.
In a market experiencing a lack of skilled workforce, our prior focus is on keeping our colleagues in order to build a strong team of professionals. But how do we do that?
A close look to the labour force evolution in the Romanian Construction sector
From a historical point of view, it seems like the labour force deficit in the Romanian Construction market has begun long before the crisis that hit the real estate sector in 2008. In 2007, for example, the construction sector in our country was counting approx. 360,000 employees, with a deficit of over 150,000 persons. According to statistical researches and estimations from those years, almost 100,000 Romanian construction workers were working abroad in 2007, most of them in Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy.
In 2008 the situation got better as, according to estimations, Romania had more than 414,000 employees in construction. But then again between 2009 and 2017 over 260,000 construction workers, both qualified and unqualified, had leaved the country, looking for better paid jobs in Western Europe and not only. As a result, in 2017 we encountered a deficit of approx. 200,000 construction workers and the number of employees that remained in the country was almost 332,000 persons. In 2018, the number of construction employees in Romania has reached 384,000.
Effects of labour force deficit in the Romanian Construction market
The migration of construction workers abroad and the lack of vocational schools in the construction field in Romania had had some important influence over the market, such as:
- We were forced to make grater investments in training new construction professionals;
- We experienced a high increase in overall construction costs;
- We struggled to keep the quality standards of the constructions;
- We had delayed delivery times for the projects;
- We found ourselves in the need to bring more foreign workers in the Romanian labour market.
Construction companies, consultancy companies, project management firms, architectural firms, we have all fought to keep our quality standards at the usual level and to keep our teams motivated.
A close look at the Vitalis team. How do we manage to keep our colleagues?
As a Construction Management company, Vitalis Consulting was not far from issues caused by the lack of labour force in the Construction market. We have encountered difficulties, both in finding new members for our team that could easily adapt to our values and needs and in performing our best work on the construction sites. Nevertheless, we are happy today with the team we had built. How did we managed?
Paying a lot of attention to the recruitment process
We always pay a lot of attention to the recruitment process. We try to choose those professionals who fit the best in our system, who can enrich our team. We are looking for cleverness, know-how and some specific skills, not only in the construction area, but in the commercial field as well. We enjoy to offer collaboration chances to fresh graduates as well, this giving us the opportunity to better train them according to our company’s values.
Listening to our colleagues opinions, issues and ideas
We have in our team highly skilled professionals in various fields such as Project Management, Cost Management, Civil Engineering and more and we enjoy to listen their opinions, issues and ideas and to learn from them every single time.
Not forgetting to have fun
Implementing a very strict control system in order to monitor your colleagues may work. But would they be happy and motivated to work harder and to stay longer in your team? Probably not. We are always trying to combine the hard work with relaxation and fun through parties, teambuilding, flexible program when needed and understanding.
Vitalis team is now counting over 80 construction experts with an age average of 35 years and an average time spent in company of more than 5 years.
We are grateful for the extraordinary people around us who made possible the successful completion of over 500 construction projects in over 13 years of industry activity and we encourage you to do everything in your power to keep your team happy, regardless of the field.