The SSC/BPO industry in Poland is still gaining momentum, therefore the need for talent remains strong. Local business leaders have made a great deal of effort to position this business as strategic to the Polish economy. Since then recognition, tailor-made educational programmes and industry-specific labour law regulations have all resulted in an inflow of talent.
Until now, the Polish outsourcing sector was mostly focused on basic transactional processes with European languages and the relevant type of talent pool being most prevalent. However, Poland has since proved its skill in servicing basic transactions and is now developing an appetite for more advanced processes. In addition to this, a steady trend towards continuous optimisation and cost-saving has pressured the industry to introduce solutions that are tied to robotic process automation. This often eliminates the need for a human factor in the servicing of basic transactional operations, by replacing it with software.
The Polish outsourcing business is still growing. We are seeing more complex processes being transferred to the country and at the same time the scope of services is being extended into new territories. What is also happening is that they are now providing more elements within one service. Hays Poland is a recruitment agency that is currently seeing urgent requests for experienced staff in analytics and/or corporate finance. Some existing in-house business centres have already decided to transfer their strategic decision-making functions to operations, based in Poland, and this seems to be happening more and more frequently.
Financial services are still waiting for large-scale relocations to nearshoring regions and Poland has already experienced some big projects of that kind, where professionals who were experienced (or recently educated) in this discipline were much sought-after. Now and in the future, investment banks and outsourcing business will be looking for both managers, experienced in financial services and graduates, with English language skills being their only requirement. We often provide candidates for fund accountants, anti-money laundering or regulatory roles. There is a fear that Brexit will mean that the British financial services’ sector will no longer fall under UE regulations, and that this might lead to the transfer of such activities outside of the UK. This could result in new processes being serviced in Poland and could mean that additional professional opportunities could be offered to the financial talent in this country.
The SSC/BPO sector started its journey here in Poland with finance and accounting but now there are also companies who want to transfer their HR and payroll, procurement, data management or marketing processes here. Despite the fact that these functions have already been in place for the last few years, the number of professionals who have experience of the outsourcing industry is still limited. The implementation of these new functions into the Polish outsourcing market will mean many jobs will become available and will be offered by companies who are willing to train candidates, who are not experienced in the outsourcing industry or graduates with foreign language skills. Due to the availability of well-educated professionals, with ease in multiple languages inside Poland, companies are also tending to locate their recruitment functions here. What is more, I would say that locating RPO to Poland is emerging as a new trend.
IT services, which constitute a considerable part of the Polish SSC/BPO industry, are not only confirming Poland’s remarkable ability to deliver high-quality service but are also highlighting the availability of talent and their capacity to grow even further. New start-ups are establishing their offices in the region every day. From the perspective of the IT sector, the Polish labour market is definitely a candidate’s market and for this reason, programmers fluent in Java, C# or .Net can choose from a variety of attractive job offers and what’s more, our recruitment experience shows that the market has not yet been saturated with IT professionals. However, the pool of Polish talent is not limited to software development specialists. The outsourcing industry offers numerous roles in IT infrastructure as well as help desk areas.
All in all, the talent pool that is available in Poland has already understood and acknowledged the mechanics of the outsourcing industry. Moreover, Poles have also started to perceive the SSC/BPO sector as an attractive sector to work in. Employees consider themselves to be adequately rewarded for their achievements and they value the possibility to develop their careers, internationally, highly.
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The views expressed in this opinion editorial are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Emerging Europe’s editorial policy.
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