Poland was the only country that didn’t suffer the same crash that laid low most economies after the Credit Crunch. What’s the secret… and why does it involve arcane ‘proverbs’?
If you’re a child of the Seventies, you probably remember a great old TV detective show featuring super-handsome insurance investigator Banacek that always ended with him saying some apposite phrase that began, ‘There’s an old Polish proverb…’ (Sample: "Read the whole library, my son, but the cheese will still smell after four days.")
If we wanted to coin a new Banacek-style ‘Polish proverb,’ only one that made some sense, we might say, ‘When it comes to dynamic economies and fantastic destinations for nearshoring – start with Germany’s closest Eastern neighbour first!’
The truth is that Poland, as a 39 million strong nation and sixth biggest in the EU, rather astonishingly managed to side-step the post 2008 crash – making it one of the healthiest economies in not just the CEE (Central and Eastern Europe), but in Europe full stop.
What’s the secret to this robust growth? A wealth of factors, primarily some smart strategic decisions by its post-Communist leaders. But the one that is of most relevance to potential customers for outsourced business services is what the country’s been up to on its education and service sector fronts.
Poles do very well in terms of general levels of educational attainment across the board, and come embarrassingly far ahead of their Western peers in basics like reading skills (at 14th in world ranking, that’s ahead of Sweden, the US – while the UK’s way down at 25th).
Allied to some sweeping reforms in the late 1990s, that’s positioned Polish Uni graduates in a very favourable position in global employment terms. Its well-rated tertiary education system pumps out 400,000 multi-lingual grads every year; 10% of them in engineering, manufacturing and construction and a very healthy 20,000-plus in science, mathematics and computing. Warsaw has invested in a network, meanwhile, of 20 so-called information and telecommunication academic centres along the lines of India that are training more than 150,000 IT, computer science and telecommunication students overall.
Even London bankers are feeling the heat
That’s not to say that Poland’s perfect; it has employment problems, and, as we know, a significant number of its citizens seek opportunities abroad. But that may also be down to some slow structural changes as the country becomes less agricultural.
What we do know is that there are more and more Poles entering the service sector, especially software and finance. Outsourcing is a no-brainer target for these budding professionals. In fact, while most of us weren’t looking, the country has, on some counts at least, somehow climbed to the top of most independent commentator’s lists of attractive outsourcing options, up there with the CEE leaders Slovakia and Bulgaria. Thus Poland is neck and neck with India for the global back office outsourcing dollar in finance, is in the top three of all outsourcing nations worldwide anyway (with China and India, again) and it’s predicted that between 15,000 to 20,000 associated jobs will come on-stream in this sector in the next 18 months.
What’s powering that: massive interest from blue chips like Credit Suisse, UBS and BNY Mellon, all of whom have plans to move processing out of places like London to Poland, while IBM has outsourced 7,500 jobs to Poland, just ahead of IT giants like Cap Gemini (6,000) and HP (4,600).
You don’t get to be a decision maker in a Credit Suisse or an HP by making stupid decisions – or even by believing absurd ‘Polish proverbs’. (Here’s another Banacek ‘classic’: "When an owl comes to a mouse picnic, it's not there for the sack races." Er, right you go, George.)
Clearly, something very interesting is going in Poland in nearshoring terms. And that’s a proverb that canny managers really can believe.
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