From: senatoremeka1@gmail.com
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:45:27 +0000
Subject: Poland struggles to reverse its brain drain
To: senatoremeka1@gmail.com
After six years living in the UK -- as a student and
then working in banking -- Krzysztof Waliszczak has moved back to his
native Poland.
He is now working for a global bank in his hometown of Krakow.
Waliszczak, 27, would have made the move back a year or
so sooner, but originally struggled to find a good job in Poland
during the height of the global economic crisis.
The final trigger that made him renew his efforts was his
mother's illness, and -- with the help of a London-based recruitment
agency, specializing in helping professional Poles find work in the
service sector back home -- he was able to secure a job quickly.
Waliszczak is just the kind of person the Polish
government wants to attract: highly educated and skilled young people
who moved abroad after accession to the European Union in 2004.
According to Poland's Central Statistical Office, around
two million Poles moved abroad between 2004 and 2009, with 70% staying
longer than a year.
While the rate leaving has since slowed, there has not
been the expected rush to return after Poland became the only European
Union nation to avoid recession in recent years.
In 2008, the Polish government launched a campaign "Have
you got a PLan to return?" targeted at Poles working abroad.
In a press release at the time, it said that
deteriorating economic situation in Western Europe, combined with
positive forecasts for Poland's own economy was expected to draw
people back.
Maciej Szczepanski, co-ordinator of Powroty, the website
set up as part of the campaign, said: "It's never been our aim to try
to convince people to come back because it's a personal decision.
"But if someone is going to come back, we want to make it
easier for them and provide all the information they need."
He added: "Many Poles who have worked in London can have
much better careers coming back than they could staying in London."
Krystyna Iglicka, professor of economics at the Center
for International Relations in Warsaw, said Poland had failed to
attract the returnees it so desperately needs.
She said: "The Polish government would be very glad to
have returnees, but it's too late. The 'Have you got a PLan to
return?' program was perceived by migrants as propaganda."
She added: "We are losing population, we are losing
young people and we are losing highly educated people. These are also
people of reproductive age and once they have children abroad it
becomes harder for them to come back.
"It's a problem for our demography and for our future."
Iglicka said returning was hard for many migrants who had
been working below their skill level abroad, and then found they
didn't have the skills to fit back into the labor market.
In 2007, Christopher Hume set up a recruitment agency, AER
International, based in London, to help an expected flood of
professional migrants return to Poland and other Eastern European
countries with booming economies.
However, the global economic crisis of 2008 has meant more
of a trickle than a flood.
"The premise for the business was taken away somewhat," said Hume.
"When we have economic uncertainty people don't tend to
migrate en mass, they tend to hunker down."
It was Hume's company that helped Waliszczak make his move
home. Like most of Hume's clients, Waliszczak had family reasons for
returning, had always planned to go home after a few years and was
willing to take the drop in salary in exchange for lower living costs
and better quality of life.
Hume said: "Most people returning are doing so for personal
reasons. As a recruiter, we are finding when people are loosely
thinking of going back, they don't do it because they can't earn as
much as they would in London."
But Hume said he was expecting return migration to increase in
the next few years as young professionals who left Poland in 2004
reached an optimum time in their career to move back.
He said: "There's a dearth of people with their kind of
international experience in Eastern Europe, so they are moving from a
highly competitive environment to one where they will be a much bigger
fish.
"I think in the next two to three years, we will see an upswing
in return migration about those professional groups who have been
abroad for seven or eight years."
The Polish government will be hoping he is right.
Waliszczak wouldn't change anything about his experience, and
believes his time abroad got him a better job than if he had remained
in Poland.
"I would recommend everyone to go abroad for a few years," he
said. "But in the end there's no place like home."
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