Wanted: at any price

Companies specializing in building construction may be reducing staff numbers – but civil engineering firms are taking on new workers. However, the route from one sector to another is not that straightforward. This is why road and bridge construction specialists feel they have nothing to fear from the current financial crisis, 
and are still raking it in

Emil Górecki

Construction projects for buildings have mostly been put on hold, but in the road and bridge construction industry there are more and more public tenders. This is not only pleasing for the construction giants that perform the role of general contractors, but it is good news for smaller companies in terms of the demand for subcontractors. In spite of the global financial crisis, the biggest companies have actually had an increase in orders, so the demand for infrastructure specialists will continue to grow for some time. Those companies with diversified portfolios have their own managers, engineers and specialists, and if possible they are now moving away from building construction contracts to engineering projects. In the next few years we are going to see many large construction projects taking place throughout the country, including schemes for roads, civil engineering, airports and railway stations. The General Directorate of National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA) spent (according to certificates of completion) PLN 14.9 mln on road projects last year. The Directorates’s 2009 financial plan envisages doubling that figure to PLN 28 mln.

First the design, then the work

The road-bridge investment process is divided into two phases: the design followed by the execution. A shortage of highly skilled employees is the biggest problem for the initial phase. “It is hard to find specialists in each design field. This is a consequence of the long education and training route that takes a few years to complete. Obtaining the necessary permits takes another five years, and this does slow down the whole process at the first stage of road construction. However the situation is quite different at the execution stage. Our discussions with the managers of the top general contractors in the road and bridge construction industry have confirmed that they still have unused resources both in terms of labour and in terms of equipment. This is because the road sector is expecting a greater number of tenders and therefore anticipating actual contracts in the next few months. So with the current level of infrastructure projects that companies are taking on, the situation is under control. However, there may be some dangers ahead. The lack of highly skilled specialists may result in something of ‘a bottleneck’ for infrastructure projects,” reports Beata Radomska, the managing director of the human resource consulting company Cigno Consulting.

This view is reiterated by Anna Talbierz, the head of the HR department of Budimex, whose responsibilities include the recruitment of employees for the construction project for the A1 motorway. The company took on dozens of people for different positions in its infrastructure departments in the second half of last year. “The recruitment process is stable at the moment, but we expect things to speed up when the execution phase of the A1 project starts. My assumption is that we are going to intensify our recruitment activities in H2. However, it is hard to quantify how much more personnel we are going to need. Internal recruitment is a priority for us; only in the case of this failing will we start searching for specialists on the market. We are currently looking for people who would be able to support us in the design phase,” reveals Anna Talbierz.

Gold dust employees

With such a huge number of public projects required for the Euro 2012 football championships that are co-financed by EU funds, there are high hopes that this public expenditure could ease the consequences of the financial crisis in Poland. The companies eager to compete for these contracts have to prepare their staff accordingly. Who is needed the most? “In terms of the design phase of infrastructure projects, the search is focused on highly skilled road and bridge designers with the appropriate qualifications. Contractors, on the other hand, are looking first of all for candidates for positions such as directors, contract managers, roadwork managers and road and bridge engineers,” according to Agnieszka Cieniuch, a construction industry consultant at Cigno Consulting.

Securing the services of an employee who is to be fully responsible for large projects often goes together with taking over a team that he or she then works with. However engineers, site mangers and specialists tend to follow their contract directors from one company to another.

How much are engineers asking for?

Last year, the Polish branch of Skanska increased operational earnings performance to 5.4 pct, compared to 2007 when this amounted to 4.7 pct. The company also generated PLN 2.8 mln in revenue. Now their order portfolio is worth PLN 5.5 mln, 134 pct more than last year, with orders for the construction of roads and bridges constituting more than a half of this, and general construction accounted for a further 30 pct. Skanska has been carrying out a cost reduction strategy (involving putting development projects on hold and reducing purchases of new equipment worth several million złoty), but the company has not yet made any cuts in its workforce of 6,000. The development strategy includes the opening of new divisions in towns where the company already has offices, so that there is a general construction division, a road-bridge division, a hydro-engineering division and a technical division in each of them. “Only a year ago we were worrying about having a sufficient number of specialists for carrying out contracts. Now things are a little easier, even when it comes to salary negotiations. Specialists have a more realistic approach,” admits Skanska’s spokesman Marcin Gesing. The company employed and trained almost 1,000 people last year, so – as Marcin Gesing suggests – despite the increasingly difficult situation on the market the company will want them to stay. Moreover, recruitment is in progress: this spring the company is planning to take on about 50 trainees with a view to retaining those that make the grade.

However, this recruitment strategy is not the same for all companies, with representatives of Mostostal Polimex admitting that they are not as active in reaching out to students and graduates as they were a year ago. Nevertheless, a spokesman for the company, Paweł Szymaniak, reveals that they still have a shortage of engineers, especially those who speak foreign languages. Last year, the firm employed 50 pct more specialists with certificates than in 2007, with the vast majority of them being young people, 36 years old or younger. But students are taken on only when they can prove and apply themselves.

Spoilt specialists

One problem is that it is rather difficult for foreigners to be infrastructure construction project managers here in Poland. Tender procedures require a lot of experience with similar Polish projects, as well as all the necessary qualifications. Now the heads of the large construction firms are afraid that recruiting the most needed and highly skilled workers will be virtually impossible by as early as the end of this year. “But the prospect of labour shortages resulting in salary increases is much more of a problem for design companies,” believes Beata Radomska of Cigno Consulting. “The salaries of these highly qualified specialists has risen considerably – employees from this sector earn at least as much as their colleagues from Western Europe. This has an inevitable influence on the cost effectiveness of projects. In the road construction sector, salaries constitute only a small percentage of the entire project’s estimate, since materials and equipment are the most expensive items. However, specialists in this sector have also increased their financial demands by about 10-20 pct, and the