#madeinwroclaw 2019 consisted of 1 day, 3 thematic blocks (PEOPLE, CHANGE, CHALLENGES), 500 participants and over 20 speakers and panellists. Wrocław IT Sector 2019 Report was also presented. We simply had to be there – IT industry is our specialty. We were happy to find that many comments made by the speakers correspond to what we see in our everyday work.
Market characteristics
We’ve got about 36,000 IT specialists in Wrocław. For comparison, production employs about 50,000 people. This is interesting, as production is also important for Wrocław, but in principal it requires much more human resources. Our city educates about 15,000 IT students every year. This means that we’ve got great access to specialists in this field. One of the speakers concluded that a new player on the market employing 500 people would not affect the competitors.
Wrocław IT industry serves in majority international firms (66%). The largest number of projects are for the finance sector (because of #PSD2?), other IT providers (subcontracting), and manufacturing.
The Wrocław IT Industry 2019 Report is available in full HERE.
Direction for development
Because IT companies operate on the global market, they should strive towards tightening local ecosystem and cooperation. Working together will bring better results than aggressive competition. The models of acquisition and retention of specialists are becoming important – this includes understanding the needs of people coming onto the job market. Many of them are completely unmoved by the methods or the language of recruitment (in particular use of “hip language”) or additional benefits. One of the unwanted practices are attempts to organise free time of staff or team building events – they rather separate work from their private lives.
IT industry firms must strike the right balance of authoritarian and democratic approaches in their management models – with dominance of democratic methods (“enlightened despotism”?). This is crucial in this industry, as it requires creativity and opportunities for self-fulfilment. Other important things are adaptation of the management model to the business development stage, ability to ignore communication noise, and going analogue at the right moments.
Wrocław is still a long way away from becoming a Silicon Valley (Krakow is another contender with robust IT sector), but we’ve got strong base and promising prospects. What stands out are projects using artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostics and health care – to use the words of one of the speakers: AI will not replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace those who don’t. I think the same may become true for specialists in many different industries, including law. 😉
Many thanks to #madeinwroclaw 2019 organizers and all speakers.