This is an interview at the Employment Centre in Iasi, Romania, carried out as part of the activities planned for the "Knowing me, you, us" Comenius Project

1. Interview at the employment centre in iasi

2. Which are the best jobs that are looked for in our county? Nowadays, the job request changes for short periods of time every 4 months but the main types of jobs are from the areas of logistics, commerce( the most important type is from IT), but we also have jobs from the garment industry and civil engineering but the most important ones are from logistics.

3. What qualifications are not required on the job market from Iasi? Regarding the qualifications, we, as a public job service provider, have our own qualification centre used in order to guarantee people’s job qualification according to the job market requests. Regarding the qualifications, we have an authorization for 35 different types of jobs from the job market and in 2010 we managed to qualify a number of 1500 people, the main domain being logistics,we also have qualification courses for commerce( chef, waiter, computer operator) and also for civil engineering(bricklayer, house painter).

4. How should the government encourage the young people who graduate from high school or university? We, as a public job service provider, are always interested in increasing the quality of our services and regarding the young people who graduate from high school or university benefit from our services because we have a course in order to inform them on the connection between school, their professional life and career and we organize visits to all the educational institutions from the county of Iasi. During these visits we inform the pupils on the latest requests on the job market, the facilities offered by the Romanian law system and we managed to inoculate the young people who graduate from high school or university the idea that in order to get a job they have to know themselves really well and to have a good knowledge on the tendencies of the job market, information that we provide with the help of these visits that are organized every year because we have a huge number of requests from the young people who graduate from high school or university in order to get the unemployment allowance or the facilities that our institution and also the Romanian government offer.

5. Do the young people who graduate from technical high school have a disadvantage to those who graduate from a university? No, because the economical development of our city involves also a development of the logistic sector and even of the technical area because in the county of Iasi there are some economical agents that need ,in their production sector, people that have technical skills, for example Delphi Diesel System Romania which produces injection pumps for diesel engines and we had them as guests this year at the job fair and we understood that they created a section ,at the “Gh. Asachi” Technical University, in which they specialize the students according to the jobs’ requirements of the company.

6. Are there job fairs every year and does your institutions take part in? Every year the job agency of Iasi plays the role of a mediator between people looking for jobs and economical agents and organizes job fairs and this year there were organized, on a national level, 2 job fairs and each of them took place on the same day in all 42 counties of Romania plus all the sectors of Bucharest.

7. And do you have a collaboration with the other national agencies? Not really, there is a collaboration between all the national agencies but every agency organizes fairs in its administrative area. There are also partnerships with private job providers which are always invited to take part in our fairs and I have to admit that there is a good collaboration with them in order to provide jobs to the people that are looking for a job.

8. Are there private job agencies in Iasi? I told you that we have private job providers that have the task to inform the people on jobs and to mediate between employers and employees, and they are also accredited by our institution.

9. Do you receive data on the qualifications or unemployment? As I told you there is a partnership between our institution and the private agencies regarding the professional development, a project that we started taking into account that we are the main public institution of the county of Iasi and that Iasi is a county which has a great number of accredited job providers. Beside the fact that we certify the quality of their courses, they are obliged to send to us information regarding the number of people that required job market information, the number of people that received job advice, the number of people that were facilitated in order to get a job so in other words we get monthly statistics from the private job provider that are on the job market.

10. What foreign investors do we have in Iasi? Nowadays, based on the latest information that I have, there are a lot of foreign investors but I will mention the most important ones, Delphi Diesel System Romania, BMT Romania, Continental and Cap Gemini. I know that another IT software provider will start its activity in Iasi and we are referring to Amazon.com.