Harnessing Competitive Resources - Skills for an IT Economy

On May 9, the Aspen Institute Romania organized the round table "Harnessing Competitive Resources - Skills for an IT Economy", with the aim to continue the series of debates regarding national competitiveness initiated by the Task Force on Competitiveness of the Aspen Institute Romania Economic Permanent Committee.

With this objective, last year, we launched the first volume of the Aspen Institute Romania White Paper on National Economic Competitiveness, focusing on agriculture, energy, the regulatory framework and European financing. However, a discussion on competitiveness would be incomplete without touching on the subjects of education and workforce development and training. That is why we propose a debate on the importance of education and skills development framework to a country's global competitiveness, in particular in the IT field. Main ideas and conclusions of the discussions will be used for the second volume of the White Paper that will deal with the IT sector, innovation and education, workforce strategies and entrepreneurship.

The event brought together 30 representatives of foreign universities with a successful track record in projects that use academic-based research in the private sector, local academia - University "Politehnica" Bucharest, University of Bucharest, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Faculty of Cybernetics, Statistics and Economic Informatics, and of the business sector. The topic is a complex one, with a wide range and magnitude of challenges that Romania faces in this regard, and which require a specific examination.
Among the key speakers: Prof. Dr. Georg Beier, Dean Physikalische Technik/Informatik, Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau (FH), University of Applied Sciences; Radu Gramatovici, Vice Dean, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest; Ronald Binkofski, CEO, Microsoft Romania; Carmen Buruiană, HR Manager, BitDefender; Alin Bittel, CEO of the Romanian Office, Materna Information and Communications SRL.
To that end, we have divided the roundtable into two panels: "Cooperation in the Field of Software Engineering and Software Development", and "Frameworks for an Effective Academia - Workforce Transition in the Field of IT". We will focus on issues such as skills needed for efficient software teams, international cooperation, challenges for international teams and internationally distributed development,  efficient teaching methods, the dynamics of change from an education system that creates knowledge to one that creates an IT industry, entrepreneurial education of IT specialists.