The average cost per hire for companies is $ 4.000, according to Glassdoor, HR, and Recruiting Stats. However, the numbers can slightly vary depending on the industry, region, or country. 

Companies are facing even a more significant challenge than rising costs. According to a survey conducted by Devskiller, 67% of recruiters are frustrated by the lack of skilled candidates.  

Upskilling potential in numbers

Recent research by PwC and the World Economic Forum shows an upskilling potential.  

The upskilling can bring globally: 

5.3 million – net new jobs by 2030

6.5trillion US$ of the potential boost to global GDP by 2030

it’s a + 3.7 % change in GDP for Central & Eastern Europe

 

Small steps. Big impact!  

By reskilling and upskilling employees, Financial-service businesses of the CEE region could see a $177 million boost in GDP by 2030.

Understanding the time demand for this change, Banca Comerciala Romana initiated a long-term partnership with Software Development Academy to upskill its employees. 

It’s not a secret that external recruitment becomes more and more expensive. When it comes to senior-level professionals, among financial reasons, there are a bunch of others: time, resources, employee engagement, and loyalty, etc. 

The program’s main goal was to increase the seniority level of IT specialists currently working in BCR. That’s why BCR decided to launch a training. 

Let’s take a closer look at the training programs. 

 

Java upskill program

This training focused on Core competencies (design patterns, coding principles, clean code, refactoring) and the Spring framework (Spring Core, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring REST, Spring Security).

As a result, during a final hackathon, the participants were divided into two groups. Application developers and interface consumers. Groups communicated through REST web services, the same technology that BCR uses in its current activity. 

The specificity and targeting of the applications were simulated real-life-like scenarios to bring the most relevant experience to the participant.

 

The Basic and Intermediate Technical Analyst program 

Depending on experience level (basics or intermediate), these two programs focused on Java programming, Java testing, Frontend (Angular, Node.js), Database, Modern software development tooling (SOAP, REST, Postman, OpenAPI, Swagger, GitLab, Kubernetes, OpenShift).

 

Main takeaways 

Important to remember, not only companies facing the skill gap. Employees of all levels of seniority feel this gap. Project with BCR only confirms the need for such actions. Upskilling is a solution that will bring benefits for workers as well as businesses. 

 

“My colleagues were very pleased with the experience, the session being far beyond their expectations!” said Tania Vasile, Head of IT Retail Department.” We appreciate the transparent and very useful feedback we got during this partnership. I am convinced that we laid the foundation stone in the development of a well-rounded analyst profile in BCR.”

 

Such a program with a BCR confirms the necessity of upskilling programs not only for BCR itself but for other much smaller companies and organizations. The skill gap is the real problem with great potential to become a financial advantage.

 

“Thank you for the professionalism, support, involvement. I am sure that in the future, we will continue collaborating with SDA with the same impressive results.” – Ana Toma – Team Lead, Learning Planning.

 

About Banca Comercială Română 

Banca Comercială Română, a member of Erste Group, is the most important financial group in Romania. Including operations of the universal bank, specialized companies on the leasing market, assets management, private pensions, housing banks, and banking services through mobile phones. 

BCR is a highly digitalized bank and puts great importance on becoming a digital bank. They recently launched George, the first smart mobile banking to get along perfectly with smartphones. With George, customers always have everything important in mind: their accounts and budgets, how much they spent, and how much they saved for their plans.

 

About Software Development Academy

SDA is an international company founded in 2014 in Poland. Since 2017 we have expanded our business abroad. Romania was the first market. 

Now, we are operating in 11 countries: Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Great Britain, Ireland, Finland, Denmark, Albania, and even the Philippines. At the moment, SDA is the largest software development academy in the region. 

With more than 7 years of experience, we have developed over 200 B2B projects internationally. The most recent projects are for Banca Comerciala Romana in Romania and Lufthansa Industry Solutions Albania. Over the years, we are helping organizations like Accenture, Ericsson, Tieto, Nordea. 

Besides this, over 10,000 students have graduated from our professional training courses, taking part in Software Development Academy’s unique model for reskilling and upskill training of future IT specialists.