Romanian skills gap begins with missing fundamentals
Rondocarton chief executive Mihnea Bîldea has warned that Romania’s education system is failing to keep pace with the needs of its economy as artificial intelligence becomes more widely used in learning. Rondocarton, one of the country’s leading corrugated cardboard packaging companies, belongs to the Austrian group Rondo Ganahl AG, which has a 230-year history.
The executive gave a stark example involving pupils enrolled in specialised technical classes. “There are children who, despite studying electrical engineering, reached the ninth year without knowing what electric current was. They did not know there was electric current at a wall socket. That is the level from which we are starting,” he said.
The company runs dual education programmes with several secondary schools in Cluj, but has found that very few pupils want to gain workplace-based qualifications.
Bîldea acknowledged that the company had to put pressure on both schools and pupils: “Do not come here to get a piece of paper, but to learn, to prove that you are learning and to pass the exam. If you are not prepared for that, it is better not to come.”
Education and industry are moving at different speeds
Bîldea was equally critical of what is presented as education reform. “We are working with an education system whose structure dates from the 1960s, yet when we change an exam, we call it reform. Reform means adapting the system to the needs of society,” he said.
According to him, the system is highly polarised. Elite schools produce “fantastic” young people, but most leave for the West, while the majority of the education system provides pupils with little of practical value, he argued.
Rondocarton itself illustrates how automation is reshaping production and exposing the wider Romanian skills gap. At its factory in Cluj, the number of direct production workers has fallen from 180 to fewer than 120, while output has increased by about 20%. The company is now investing around €7 million in automating its factory in Târgoviște.
“We are not seeing an improvement in the quality of the workforce or an increase in the number of skilled workers. The sources of growth for our economy have been exhausted precisely because of the labour shortage,” Bîldea said.
He does not believe lower wages offer a solution.
“Wages are set by the market. We expect wages in Romania to continue rising precisely because of the labour shortage. To remain profitable, we must increase labour productivity,” he said.
Human judgement remains central in the AI era
Looking ahead, Bîldea is cautiously optimistic about the role of people in an increasingly automated economy. Automation will eliminate routine and repetitive tasks, but complex decisions will remain in human hands, requiring workers who can understand complexity and adapt to it.
Over the next 10 years, employees will need critical thinking, a willingness to keep learning, strong communication skills and a solid foundation in the exact sciences. Their role will increasingly involve understanding complex environments, making real-time decisions and adapting processes to market demands, tasks that artificial intelligence is unlikely to replace in the foreseeable future.
The Romanian skills gap therefore poses a fundamental challenge to the country’s economy. If pupils who choose electrical engineering do not understand that a socket carries an electric current, prospects for a technological leap remain limited.
Bîldea argues that the fault lies not with the pupils but with a system that fails to provide them with essential knowledge. While reforms continue to be discussed, companies are creating dedicated posts to teach older pupils the fundamentals of physics.
