WORLD NEWS
A Boeing 787 Dreamliner prepares for take-off at Britain's Farnborough Airshow. Polish engineers helped design the engines that General Electric is building for the 787.
As its universities turn out engineering grads, Poland attracts US tech giants
WARSAW, Poland — Foreign companies flock to invest. Its balance sheet is the envy of Europe. Top university programs crank out graduates whom everyone wants to hire.
Such is the current reputation of Poland, which has continued to grow during the global financial crisis as neighboring countries decline, lining itself up for a strong run to become the continent’s next economic powerhouse.
General Electric officials say they haven’t for a moment regretted basing one of their global design centers here, where Polish engineers helped create the new GEnx engine for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. (NBC News is owned by NBCUniversal. Comcast Corporation owns a controlling 51 percent interest in NBCUniversal, with General Electric holding a 49 percent stake.)
“In 2000, we ended the year with 11 engineers,” said G.E.’s human-resources director in Warsaw, Kinga Zalucka. “Today, we have 1,300 engineers. I think it was a good choice.”
How has Poland pulled off this feat of economic magic? Observers say it’s not just about the low labor costs compared to neighboring Germany, or the boon of a currency freed from the struggling Euro. They point to an impressive, decade-long campaign to raise the quality of secondary and university education.
“Students needed more in general education, including subjects like math, in order to help them stay flexible and navigate the labor market later on,” said Nina Arnhold, a senior education specialist at the World Bank, referring to Poland’s strategy. “It made a huge difference.”
University enrollment has quintupled since the 1990s, with private-university enrollment now accounting for around 25 percent of the total. According to Eurostat, the proportion of Polish young people (aged 25 to 34) with college degrees has jumped from 15.0 to 37.4 percent since 2001.
Those reforms have helped Poland gain a clear edge in the global race for engineering talent. In one survey by McKinsey & Company, human-resources directors said the proportion of Polish graduates prepared to work in multinational environments was at least double that of their peers in China and India.
“It’s a modern, dynamic system,” said Arnhold. “They did many things right.”
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