December 2 (SeeNews) - More than half of the companies active in Romania plan to increase employee numbers, the results of a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Romania showed on Monday.
Some 54% of surveyed companies plan to increase their number of employees by an average of 11% in 2020, according to PwC Romania’s
HR Barometer survey.
The IT&C sector has the highest demand for new employees, followed by industry, automotive and retail.
The survey shows that 91% of IT&C companies plan to increase the number of employees by an average of 20% next year. In industry and automotive, 71% want to hire 6.2% more people and 50% of retail companies need to expand their workforce by 6.4%.
The need for personnel increases were also mentioned by 40% of financial services companies and 30% of pharmaceutical companies.
"Our estimates show that Romania needs another one million employees in the next five years to achieve an average economic growth of 3.5% annually. As we know, in recent years the workforce has become more difficult to find, which risks limiting the potential for economic development," Country Managing Partner, PwC Romania Ionut Simion said.
Therefore, the government and companies should be involved in education programmes to develop the employee skills, especially digital ones, increasingly demanded by employers as new technologies become widely adopted, Simion explained.
According to the survey, almost all of the new positions created in 2019 were in the digital and social media area.
The survey respondents also indicated their belief that accounting, IT support, administrative, financial and business analysis departments would be most affected by automation.
"The main challenges faced by human resources departments in 2020 will be staff fluctuations and low commitment, rising wage costs, the impact of digitalization and workforce shortage. New technologies and automation mean new skills and positions, which is increasingly being reflected in Romanian employers’ organisational charts," PwC Romania senior manager People&Organisation Oana Munteanu said.
Almost all of the HR Barometer respondents consider themselves prepared for the workforce shortages and wage cost challenges in attracting and increasing employee numbers in 2020, the results of the survey indicated.
PwC Romania conducted the HR Barometer study on 65 companies in various sectors during October 2019.