Poland: Eduaction, Personnel and Labor Market
One of the key factors that make Poland one of the most attractive areas for FDI is undoubtedly the structure of its society. According to a survey among foreign investors - commissioned by Polish Information and Foreign Investment Agency - youth, ambitiousness and high skills are the most crucial characteristics of the Polish society that render Poland such an attractive investment area.
Poland has the largest working population in Central Europe. It possesses also one of the youngest populations on the continent: 50% of the Polish society is under the age of 34 and 35% is under the age of 25 years. This means an approximate number of 13m young and well-educated people that will enter the labor market in the near future.
Poland provides a nationwide network of 427 centers of higher education. It consists of 126 public higher education academies including 17 universities, 18 universities of technology, as well as 301 private schools of tertiary education. Every year an approximate number of 211,000 students graduate in social sciences, business and law, 43,000 in engineering, manufacturing and construction, 22,000 in science, mathematics and computing. There are 20 information and telecommunication academic centers (ICT) and each of them counts a number of more than 2,500 students and more than 150,000 IT, computer science and telecommunication students overall.
Polish Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) education centers and specialists are highly recognized worldwide. They have been continuously winning in the prestigious Top Coder ranking and also achieving high positions in the worldwide Google Code Jam Competition (1st place in 2005) and the IBM Linux Scholars Challenge (1st place in 2005). Polish IT specialists are employed by the largest IT companies in the world. They also constitute major parts of managers responsible for research and development (R&D) activities in multinational corporations such as Microsoft and Nokia.
The level of foreign language knowledge of young Polish is rising steadily and very fast. The most popular foreign language is English, followed by German and Russian. A 44% of Polish society is able to communicate in a foreign language, 33% speak at least two foreign languages. A significant number of 80% of all students do speak English.
Foreign investors highly rate the skills and commitment of Polish employees. In many cases the Polish subsidiaries of foreign companies were considered to be the most successful units worldwide according to their management. In the 2005 Ernst & Young Report, Poland is placed fifth after Germany, UK, France and Scandinavian countries considering the level of labor skills. Rotation between various companies is common, thus professionals are very versatile regarding skills from many sectors.
Due to rapid economic development and an increasing number of foreign investment in Poland the need for qualified production employees and engineers is contemporaneously rising. The labor market is stabilising and the average income is also increasing. In 2005 the average monthly salary in the business sector for example added up to approximately EUR 592, while in February 2007 it reached an amount of about EUR 702.
According to law in Poland there are 12 monthly salaries to be paid per year, whereas more can be agreed upon as bonus or commission. The income tax is on a gradual basis: 19%, 30%, 40%. The social security contributions are to be partly paid by the employer (19.83% and 22.72%) and partly by the employee himself (18.71%).
It is estimated that the UEFA EURO 2012 event will boost the Polish economy and especially the labor market. The FDI inflow of at least EUR 3bn within one year will create at least about 370 thousand jobs in the sports sector, the entertainment and leisure sector as well as in the road, rail and air traffic sector.
