Battle of the back offices

This was a joke about students from a few decades ago and is something of an old chestnut now. My generation and older ones can still laugh at it, but younger people of the Y generation and especially the Z generation might fail to get the gist. It also has to be admitted that there’s not much truth left in this old joke. The SSC/BPO industry is here, waiting for students with open arms. In fact, it is actually rather concerned that the stream of young, well educated Poles is drying up, which we write about in the article entitled ‘Young, Talented and... Gone?’. Will our neighbours from the south (the Czechs, the Bulgarians or the Romanians) overtake us in the race for new investment from this sector? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, office developers are taking advantage of the boom and battling it out with each other to attract international corporations (mostly from the SSC/BPO sector), to their new office projects, including in regional cities in Central and Eastern Europe. Cities such as Kraków, Wrocław and the TriCity as well as Brno, which we cover in the ‘Think Globally, Build Locally’ article, have grown to become attractive office locations of interest not only to developers but also investors. Skanska is one of the companies flexing its muscles in regional cities. Katarzyna Zawodna, the new president of Skanska Commercial Development Europe, and Arkadiusz Rudzki, the newly-promoted head of Skanska Property Poland, tell us how to build projects specifically for SCC/BPO firms and about the company’s plans under its new management regime.