Vocational Schooling Decline Causes Romania Skills Shortage

Only 1.4 per cent of Romanian pupils are currently enrolled in vocational schools, which is not enough to supply the labour market with skilled workers, human resources experts and company representatives have warned.

"It is obvious that most of the companies in the manufacturing sector have been affected in the recent years by the deficit of vocational schools graduates," human resources consultant Ruxandra Gavrilescu told BIRN.

"So they have had to adapt their strategies and create their own schools for training people in order to have the qualified workers they needed. It is a situation that will continue in the years to come too," Gavrilescu said.

In 2009, following a decrease in interest in vocational schools, the Romanian authorities decided to shut them altogether.

But three years later, they were reopened on the request of companies that were facing a lack of qualified workers.

Since then, the education ministry has tried to reorganise vocational education so that it will better meet companies' needs.

According to a governmental document, the vocational schooling programme for this year was arranged following consultations with more than 3,700 companies, which submitted lists of the kind of qualifications workers should have.

But despite this, the numbers of pupils choosing vocational education are still small, according to Silviu Badea, the director of auto industry conglomerate Grupul Industrial Componente Pitesti.

"One of the biggest problems we have today is related to the workforce because we don't have enough people graduating from vocational schools," Badea told Romanian news agency Mediafax last month.

"We are in the position of working with teams of people who are more than 50 years old and no...