Money Buzz! Europa

Category: Jobs

  • 47% of companies will make remote work a permanent option

    47% of companies will make remote work a permanent option

    Almost two-thirds (64%) of the respondents globally plan new safety measures and requirements for employees in order to return to work, according to the most recent edition of PwC’s COVID-19 CFO Pulse Survey, from 28 April.

    In this context, 55% want to reconfigure work sites to promote physical distancing and 22% to reduce real estate footprint.

    47% of the companies make remote work a permanent option for roles that allow, 46% want to accelerate automation and new ways of working and 44% to change shifts and/or alternate crews to reduce exposure.

    Regarding the COVID-19 impact on businesses, the level of concern related to the crisis is holding steady with the previous edition of the survey, with 70% expecting significant impact to their business operations and most of them (80%) across all territories expect a decrease in revenues and profits.

    From an industry perspective, retail and consumer CFOs report the highest level of concern (75%), because of the decrease in consumer confidence and the consumption power, due to reduced disposable income.

    The lowest level of concern about the potential business impact was reported by energy, utilities and resources CFOs (57%).

    The share of the CFOs believe their operations could return to „business as usual” within three months if the coronavirus pandemic were to end today, fell to 49% from 56% in the previous edition of the survey.

    Other conclusions of PwC’s COVID-19 CFO Pulse Survey

    • The main priority of finance leaders is cost containment. Thus, the share of those considering cost reduction measures increased to 82%, from 77% in the previous edition.
    • In the top of CFOs concerns are the potential global recession (69%), the financial impact on operations (67%) and consumption decrease (58%, up from 39% in the previous report).
    • CFOs in the financial sector are most likely to be concerned about recession (74%) and financial impact (72%).
    • CFOs in Ireland take the most hardline view, with 98% saying they expect the crisis to lead to a decrease. Even in countries with a more optimistic outlook, CFOs take it as a given that the economic impact of the coronavirus will reduce revenues and profits: Switzerland (80%), Denmark (73%) and Germany (66%).
    • Among industries, financial services (86%), industrial manufacturing and automotive (86%), and retail and consumer (80%) have the highest share of CFOs who expect a decrease in revenue.
    • About half of the respondents say they will prioritise the development of alternate sourcing options (52%), understanding the financial and operational health of their suppliers (50%) and change contractual terms (42%).
    • 56% plan to include discussion of the coronavirus in their financial statements.

    The survey was led among 871 CFOs from 24 countries or territories: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malta, Mexico, Middle East, Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, US and Vietnam.

  • The employment rate in Czech Republic exceeded 75% for the first time since 2018

    The employment rate in Czech Republic exceeded 75% for the first time since 2018

    Total employment in the Q1 2020 decreased by 28.1 thousand persons, year-on-year (y-o-y) and reached 5.277.4 thousand persons. The number of the unemployed, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) methodology, dropped by 3.6 thousand persons, y-o-y.

    The general unemployment rate stagnated at 2.0%. The number of the economically inactive aged 15+ years has significantly increased, by 58.7 thousand.

    In the Q1 2020, the average number of employed persons increased by 1.1 thousand persons, compared to the Q4 2019.

    The number of working persons aged 15+ years decreased by 28.1 thousand persons, y-o-y, i.e. by 0.5%, to 5 277.4 thousand persons.

    The number of working males decreased by 4.9 thousand persons and the number of working females decreased by 23.2 thousand persons.

    The number of employees decreased by 21.5 thousand to 4 389.9 thousand.

    Concurrently, the total number of the self-employed decreased by 6.4 thousand persons due to a drop in the number of the self-employed with employees by 13.7 thousand.

    The deepest decrease of the self-employed with employees was in wholesale and retail trade and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles and at the same time in the age group of 45–54 years.

    The employment rate (percentage of working persons in the age group 15–64 years) has been exceeding 75% for the first time in the history of independent Czech Republic since the middle of the year 2018.

    In the Q1 2020, the rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point (p. p.) to 74.8% compared to the Q1 2019. The male employment rate decreased by 0.1 p. p. to 81.6% and the female employment rate dropped by 0.3 p. p. to 67.8%.

  • How Albanian labour market looked in 2019

    How Albanian labour market looked in 2019

    • Over the year 2019, according to Albanian Labour Force Survey estimates, labour force in Albania is 1.430 thousand persons.
    • Females account for 44.4 % of the labour force and males for 55.6 % of it.

    Employed are 1,266 thousand persons, from which females account for 44.5 % and males for 55.5 %. The number of unemployed is estimated in 165 thousand persons, of which 44.0 % are females and 56.0 % are males.

    The labour force participation rate for the population aged 15-64 years old is 69.6 %. For male population aged 15-64, the labour force participation rate is 16.0 percentage points higher than females. The employment rate for the population aged 15-64 years old is 61.2 %. Employment rate for females
    is 54.4 % and for males is 68.2 %. The gender gap in employment for this age-group is 13.8 percentage points.

    The services and agricultural sectors have the highest share of employed with respectively 43.5 % and 36.4 % of the total employment. According to the 2019 survey estimates, it results that 45.7 % of employed are paid employees, 32.3 % are self-employed (with employees or without employees) and 22.0 % are contributing family workers.

    Unemployment rate decreased

    The official unemployment rate, for the population 15 years old and over, is 11.5 % decreasing by 0.8 percentage points compared to 2018. For males, the unemployment rate is 0.2 percentage points higher than for females.

    Youth (15-24 years old) unemployment rate is 27.2 %, (27.8 % for males and 26.3 % for females).

    Compared to the previous year, youth unemployment rate has decreased by 1.1 percentage points.

    Over the year 2019, youth aged 15-29 years old neither in employment nor in education or training account for 28.9 % of the same age group population.

  • Unemployment rate in Czech Republic was only 2.0% in March

    Unemployment rate in Czech Republic was only 2.0% in March

    • The general unemployment rate of the aged 15–64 years in Czech Republic reached 2.0% in March 2020 and decreased by 0.1%, year-on-year.
    • The male unemployment rate attained 1.8%;
    • The female unemployment rate reached 2.2%.

    The employment rate of the aged 15–64 years reached 74.5% in March 2020 and decreased by 0.7% compared to that in March 2019. The male employment rate was 81.3%; the female employment rate was 67.4%, both seasonally adjusted.

    The employment rate of persons aged 15–29 years, seasonally adjusted, was 46.5%, in the age group 30–49 years it attained 88.6%, and in the age group 50–64 years it got to 76.2%.

    The economic activity rate of the aged 15–64 years reached 76.0% and declined by 0.8% compared to that in March 2019. Following the seasonal adjustment, the male economic activity rate (82.8%) exceeded the female economic activity rate by 13.9%

    “Over a half of March was already affected by measures taken against the coronavirus spreading including temporary closure of many enterprises and schools. Many workers thus could not perform work activities and part of them were home quarantined or stayed at home receiving a carer’s allowance. It has not influenced employment or unemployment; however, it was significantly reflected in statistics of time worked”, Dalibor Holý, Director of Labour Market and Equal Opportunities Statistics Department of the Czech Statistical Office, noted.

  • Corona crisis has an enormous impact on the Austrian labour market

    Corona crisis has an enormous impact on the Austrian labour market

    The corona crisis has an enormous impact on the Austrian labour market, show the latest data published by Statistics Austria. Starting with the national shutdown in mid-March 2020, unemployment increased almost instantly.

    More than 35.000 job losses were registered on 15 March alone. Thus, the national labour market agency recorded massive inflows (+65.7% compared to March of the previous year) into the unemployment register.

    By end of March, there were 504.345 (+199 934) persons registered as unemployed.

    Yet, this situation has no immediate impact on unemployment according to the international definition, as latest results of the Austrian Labour Force Survey conducted by Statistics Austria show.

    However, there is a clear decrease in the number of people in employment (-77.500; -1.8%) and a corresponding increase of economically inactive persons available to work but not seeking a job (+51.3% to 160 500).

    At the same time, 173.100 people stated that they had not worked at all or worked less than during a regular working week due to slack work in March 2020, this is seventeen times more than in March 2019.

  • Employees who work from home appreciate saving time and money

    Employees who work from home appreciate saving time and money

    The saving of money and time spent in traffic are the main advantages considered by the employees of office buildings that are currently working from home, while the disadvantages mentioned are the lack of direct socialization with the colleagues, in the first place, followed by the difficulty in separating professional from personal time, secondly, results in a survey conducted by the real estate consulting company Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

    The study was applied online via a questionnaire to more than 200 employees who normally work from the office, but have been working from home in the last weeks, as part of the social distancing measures adopted to limit the spread of Covid-19.

    The respondents have an average age of 36 years and work mainly in Bucharest (88%), in various sectors of activity, such as professional services (24%), financial (18%), real estate (17%) or technology and telecommunications (13%).

    On average, respondents performed their activity at home for 15 working days before completing the questionnaire.

    80% of the respondents appreciate saving the time spent in traffic, a considerable advantage in the context in which, on average, the employees in Bucharest have a commuting time between home and office of about 45 minutes on a regular day, according to a study performed last year by Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.

    The following advantages are considered to be financial savings (for 49% of the respondents), the improvement work-life balance (43%), more freedom to manage working hours (40%), as well as the extra rest time (33 %).

    What about the disadvantages

    On the other hand, the biggest disadvantage is the lack of direct socialization with colleagues, mentioned by 74% of the respondents, followed by the difficulties in separating the time dedicated to the professional activity and the personal one (44%), the lack of a proper space to work (33%) and the diminished capacity to focus, due to disturbing factors in the house (33%).

    Other issues reported are related to difficulties in managing the relation with clients and collaborators (29%), technical issues (26%) and lack of direct feedback on the activity performed (24%).

    In this context, there is a certain balance in terms of the general description of the work from home experience. Thus, 38% of the respondents consider this period as very good or excellent, 34% good, while for 28% of them the work from home time is unsatisfactory or even frustrating.

    Moreover, the option of working exclusively from home after the activity restriction ending period is preferred by only 3% of the respondents, most of them opting for a flexible program of 4 work from the office days and 1 from home (39% of respondents) or 3 days at the office and 2 at home (27%). On average, the employees interviewed would choose, if they had the opportunity, to work 3.4 days from the office and 1.6 days from home.

  • DriveNets and Tellence to double Bucharest R&D Team

    DriveNets and Tellence to double Bucharest R&D Team

    DriveNets announced that they will double the Bucharest based team size, growing it from the current 50 to 100 by the end of 2020.

    The center of excellence will strengthen the companies’ technological leadership in working with Tier 1 service providers to build their networks for the next 20 years.

    With the COVID-19 pandemic creating unprecedented traffic growth reported by service providers globally, it is expected that the need for high-scale low-cost networking solutions such as DriveNets Network Cloud solution will increase.

    In September 2019 Tellence created a significant R&D center for DriveNets and have now successfully trained and integrated with the Israel based teams ahead of schedule. DriveNets and Tellence are now seeking software engineers with expertise in Networking, NFV/SDN & Cloud Solutions, Customer Support Engineers with deep understanding of Networking Routing & Switching protocols & Networking Quality Assurance Engineers.

    Tellence is recruiting developers and support & QA engineers who are experienced in routing, Layer 2, BSP & scalable elastic Software architectures, state of the art web front-end & back-end solutions, DevOps, and QA – Manual & Automatons. It is also looking for domain experts in the following areas:

    • Protocols: BGP (UC,LU), IS-IS, OSPF, OPSF-TE, RSVP, LDP, VPN & MVPN;
    • FrontEnd: React, NodeJS, JS, CSS, UI/UX.

  • The gross wages in private sector increased by an average of 9.4% in 2019

    The gross wages in private companies increased by an average of 9.4% in 2019, according to PayWell Salary and Benefits Survey conducted by PwC Romania.

    The salary increase reported for 2019 exceeds the level of 4.6% estimated for this year by the respondent companies in the previous edition. For 2020, private companies are estimating a 5.7% average gross wage increase.

    The highest average wage growth in 2019, of 14%, was recorded for the hotel sector. Also, increases over the average of all sectors included in the survey were reported by industry + 11%, leasing +10% and retail +10%. According to Paywell 2019, the average gross salary among respondent companies rose to RON 5,941 from RON 5,428 in 2018.

    In terms of staff categories, continues the tendency to increase at a faster rate of wages among unskilled or low-skilled personnel (workers, operators), on average 10%.

    Compared to the previous years, however, when salaries at the managerial levels stagnated, in 2019 the operational management positions increased by 13% and the top management positions by 9%. At the opposite, with 5%, there are administrative staff, technicians and employees with little experience.

    „We note that the wage increase in 2019 was higher than the level predicted by the companies included in Paywell last year, being influenced mainly by the workforce shortage, but also by the evolution in the public sector and by the government decisions regarding the minimum wage. As a result of the cumulative increases of about 50% that have been taken place in the public sector since 2017, the ratio between PayWell average income, representing mostly medium & large companies, and national average income has dropped from 1.4 to 1,16 during this period. In this context, private companies face a double pressure: on the part of the public sector, which has become much more attractive for the employees and the workforce shortage that has intensified in recent years”, said Daniel Anghel, Leader of the Tax and Legal Department, PwC Romania.

    In terms of benefits, meal tickets, annual leave days and special occasion bonus continue to be top. However, compared to previous years, the biggest increases in popularity were recorded by time management (flex time, work from home) and benefits related to the well-being of employees (bookstore, health programs, etc.).

    Other conclusions of the PwC study

    • Top average gross salaries in 2019 by function were in Strategy – RON 12.220, followed by Legal – RON 11.026 and IT – RON 10.769.
    • Bucharest continues to lead the earnings top, with average salary almost double as compared to Muntenia.
    • At county level, the top five Paywell are Bucharest-Ilfov, Timis, Cluj, Brasov and Iasi.
    • The largest wage increases in 2020 are estimated for retail, of 7.42%, the pharmaceutical sector, 6.3%, and banking, 4.73%.

  • PwC will invest USD 3 billion in upskilling its employees

    The new technologies will affect, annually, between 5 and 10% of the jobs of each organization and will generate discrepancies between the existing and the necessary skills, according to PwC global estimates.

    In this context, PwC has launched a program to improve the digital skills of the 276,000 employees worldwide, as well as to develop new technologies to support companies and communities in the digital transformation process.

    „As our clients face increasing challenges and opportunities driven by technological advances, stakeholder expectations and other changes, they require us to work together across the broad range of our operations helping them to deal with issues such as cyber security, trust, regulation and strategic workforce planning. The skills gap is an issue that goes to the heart of our purpose and we have the scale and experience to make a measurable impact. That’s why today we are launching ‘New world, New skills”, said Bob Moritz, PwC’s Global Chairman.

    Over the next four years, we are committing $3bn in upskilling – primarily in training our people but also in developing and sharing technologies to support clients and communities.

    New world, New skills focuses on:

    • Upskilling all of PwC’s 276,000 people in areas like data analytics, robotics process automation and artificial intelligence for use in their work and also to advise clients, communities, and other stakeholders in the process of adopting new technologies.
    • Advising our clients on the challenges posed by rapid technological change and automation. This includes identifying skills gaps and mismatches against likely future needs, workforce planning, upskilling programs and cultural change.
    • Work with governments, institutions and teachers for developing programs to help millions of people improve their digital skills, including among those populations most ‘at risk’.

    According to PwC Upskilling Hopes and Fears, 53% of the employees worldwide feel threatened by automation and 77% want to learn new digital skills.

    Over 60% are positive about the impact of technology on their day-to-day work, but only one-third are offered opportunities to develop digital skills outside the daily work.

  • Business executives expect automation to increase workforce capacity by 27%

    Business executives expect automation solutions such as robotics, machine learning and natural language processing to increase workforce capacity by 27% over the next three years, shows the latest Deloitte Automation with Intelligence Survey, conducted on over 500 organisations in 26 countries worldwide, including Romania.

    This increase is equivalent to 2.4 million extra full time employees in the over 500 organisations that took part in Deloitte’s survey, presenting significant potential to boost productivity and to improve the human experience, as roles are redesigned.

    More than half (58%) of organisations across the world have deployed at least one automation solution, shows the survey. Although still small, the number of organisations that have implemented automation at scale has doubled over the past year. According to the survey, 8% of executives have deployed over 50 automation solutions in their business, compared to 4%, in 2018.

    Still, despite the uptick in adoption of automation technologies, a significant proportion of business leaders have not forecast the impact that these technologies will have on their employees, the report reveals. Thus, 60% of executives have not yet looked into whether automation will require their workers to retrain and 44% have not assessed whether automation will change the roles and tasks their workers do and the way they do them.

    The level of employees’ support for these technologies tends to grow significantly as organisations move further along their automation journey. For example, 32% of executives whose organisations are piloting automation solutions say their workforce is unsupportive, compared to just 12% in organisations which are implementing or scaling such solutions.

    “The business environment is now evolving from finding digitized ways of working – through robotics to automate repetitive rules-based processes – to making these solutions smarter by integrating AI capabilities. In Romania, players in telecoms and financial services are front runners in the implementation of new ways of working and new technologies, however at a slower pace compared to their western peers,” said Dinu Bumbacea, Consulting Partner-in-charge, Deloitte Romania.

    Organisations see as primary benefits of intelligent automation technologies the increased productivity and cost reduction, greater accuracy and an improved customer experience, the survey shows.

    Deloitte Automation with Intelligence Survey analyses the uptake of automation technologies and its impact on the workforce. It is conducted based on responses from 523 executives leading organisations in 26 countries with a combined annual turnover of USD 2.7 trillion.

  • 53% of the employees worldwide feel threatened by automation

    More than half of global employees feel threatened by automation and believe that will significantly change or make their job obsolete within the next ten years, according to PwC Upskilling Hopes and Fears research. They also feel that their current employers could be doing more to help them acquire new digital skills

    The majority, 61%, were positive about the impact of technology on their day-to-day work, and 77% of people would learn new skills now or completely retrain to improve their future employability. 

    ”In Central & Eastern Europe we see that people are increasingly aware that technology and automation are going to significantly change the labour market and that their jobs are going to be impacted. At PwC, we have embarked on an ambitious digital upskilling initiative across CEE, not just for the PwC professionals, but also working with our clients and stakeholders to advance this important issue across the territories of our region”, said Nick Kós, CEO of PwC Central & Eastern Europe.

    The research was carried out on over 22,000 adults from 11 countries: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, the UK and the US), starting from PwC research showing that 30% of jobs are at risk from automation by the mid-2030s.  Meanwhile, PwC’s 2019 annual CEO survey shows that the availability of skills is a top concern for 79% of CEOs.

    “The technology will contribute to the disappearance of some jobs and, at the same time, to the creation of new ones that will need increased digital skills. The transformation of the economy and the labor market due to technology will affect both employees and employers. For this reason, companies and authorities must show openness, adapt to change and, of course, invest in education and training to get the most benefit from this process,” said Ionuț Simion, Country Managing Partner PwC Romania.

    77% of the employees worldwide want to learn new digital skills

    • The opportunities and attitudes vary significantly by an individual’s level of education, location, gender and age.
    • Over a third (34%) of adults without school education or training beyond school say they are not learning any new digital skills compared with just 17% of college graduates
    • Men are more likely than women to think that technology will have a positive impact on their jobs are also more likely to be learning new skills (80% of the men surveyed say they are doing so versus 74% of women). 
    • 69% of 18-34 year olds feel positively about the future impact of technology on their jobs compared with 59% of 35-54 year olds, and 50% of those aged 55+.