More than 300,000 mostly young Slovaks have left the country in the past 15 years. (source: TASR)
The drop in competitiveness and departure of foreign investors are only some of the effects the lack of IT experts might have on Slovakia’s economy.
The representatives of IT companies agree that the lack of skilled IT specialists already impact companies in a negative way. The 2016 Eurostat data suggests that more than half of Slovak companies struggle to fill the vacancies with IT specialists, such as programmers, data scientists and security experts, said Karol Kniewald, corporate affairs manager at Cisco.
“Unfortunately, this state cannot be changed in the near future, despite the efforts of universities,” Ján Ružarovský, CEO of SAP Labs Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator.
(source: The Slovak Spectator)
Czech schools are popular
Slovakia loses its young talented people already at a young age, when deciding about their future school. The country reports the highest number of students leaving to study abroad in the European Union, says Mário Lelovský of the IT Association of Slovakia (ITAS). A popular destination is the Czech Republic.
“I decided to study in the Czech Republic since it offered higher quality education,” Peter Majerčík, an IT programming student at Masaryk University in Brno, told The Slovak Spectator.
28-year-old Miroslav Šoltés, a graduate of the Information Technology Faculty of the Brno University of Technology, was also persuaded by the school’s quality and its placement in the ranking of the 500 best schools in the world.
31-year-old Marek Chrenko, a graduate from Masaryk University in Brno, appreciates the professionalism of the teachers, who were open to discussion with students, and the technical equipment of his school. Moreover, the entire student agenda can be done on the internet.
“The school gave us more than a summary of information; it helped us open our minds in a more analytical direction,” he added.
The problem is not the fact that Slovaks study at schools abroad, but that they do not return after graduating, according to Ružarovský.
