Dear colleagues, dear friends,

It is my great pleasure to address you at this event, an excellent opportunity to share our visions and strategic views on one of the most important ingredients in building institutional capacity – people and knowledge. Unfortunately, we again meet in an unconventional virtual mode that is stark remainder of the exceptional times and challenges that we all face with, as humans and professionals. We do see silver linings on the horizon though. And, for this we must be thankful to the scientists and health workers, who now leverage on their past investment in knowledge and innovations to shield the humanity from the “plaque” that inhibits us from conveying our missions.

At this point, we must not remain oblivious to the tectonic changes that we made last year in adapting the working environment to the new circumstances.  In a blink of an eye, we have introduced remote working, rotational structures, and made the virtual meeting and communication platforms inevitable part of our daily lives. We have leveraged the digitalisation, and succeeded to continue with our daily activities uninterrupted and to proceed with building the developmental blocks in our long term strategy, as well. None of this would have been possible, without people - human capital in which investments have been made in the last couple of decades. These investments are joint ventures of the institution itself, and the international institutions which have been putting an extraordinary effort to provide support in extending knowledge, training professionals and making them resilient and with capacity to swiftly follow professional mainstreams and efficiently contribute to policy decision–making.

The corporate culture in our central bank has traditionally been oriented towards investing in knowledge, skills and capacities of our people.  Leveraging on my personal experience, I think that the level playing field for all the employees to have equal access to the courses and trainings offered in the portfolio of many leading central banks, international financial institutions and organisations, such as the Centre of Excellence in Finance itself, is one of the most important dimensions of the human resource policy. The possibility for the employees to upgrade their knowledge, critical thinking, their skills on a permanent basis, while networking with their peers across the globe is a cornerstone of making an institution an “employer of choice” for young talents.

As economists, we understand fully the strivings of all economies to grow in a sustainable, smart and inclusive way. For this to become reality, the basic prerequisite is to have high quality human capital with knowledge, skills, and intrinsic values for collaboration, tolerance, and understanding diversities. Unfortunately, labour shortages are becoming a headwind for stronger growth and convergence of the region. Quality dimension of labour force is one of the pivotal prerequisites for lifting potential growth. Labour and human capital quality has been noted as area where large gap compared to the more advanced countries is detected. This has been particularly the case with the countries in the South Eastern Europe, where some of the human capital indicators, such as female participation rate, health and primary education, higher education and training are positioned bellow the 25th percentile of the distribution across OECD and CESEE countries.

Reflecting upon the conclusions in the latest Global Competiveness Report, several years before the pandemic crisis, skills mismatches, talent shortages and increasing misalignment between incentives and rewards for workers had been flagged globally as problematic for advancing productivity, prosperity and inclusion. The pandemic stressed these issues once again. To address them, “countries should focus in the revival phase on gradually transitioning from furlough schemes to new labour market opportunities, scaling up reskilling and upskilling programs and rethinking active labour market policies. In the transformation phase, leaders should work to update education curricula and expand investment in the skills needed for jobs in “markets of tomorrow”, and in parallel rethink labour laws for the new economy and use new talent management technologies to adapt to the new needs of the workforce”.

Fortunately, both you as training provider and we as an institutional employer, despite all the dares caused by the pandemic did not at any point in the timeline lost awareness of these critical matters. The first priority at the emergence of the crisis was to assure that people are working in a safe environment. The second priority was to make a conducive context for all of us to emerge from the crisis stronger, more confident and forward looking.  One of the tools for making this goal reality was exactly supporting all employees in keeping pace with the old and new challenges, by enabling continuity of the learning process throughout the pandemic. The fact that many webinars and courses on virtual platforms were organised throughout the year pinpointed the mutual consensus on the importance of keeping people up to date and keeping them together in exceptional times. These joint strivings by you as organisers, and the supportive role of us as institutions enabled inclusive and flexible uninterrupted learning process and further development of our human resources.

The Center of Excellence in Finance has been one of our main partners in gaining and sharing knowledge and professional experience in the last twenty years. Observing through the sequential lenses, it is visible that it has been achieving major milestones, by tailoring its portfolio to the needs of its partners, filling the most important skills gap and supporting us in building capacities for effective policymaking. Tailoring of the portfolio to the needs and avenues of the central banking is also visible, with the supervision, financial stability, macro-prudential issues, financial inclusion and literacy, statistics being in your perimeter of activities. Even before the occurrence of the recent health crisis, the Center embarked on major changes, empowered by the new digitalisation tools to make the learning process more inclusive and interactive. The online learning campus and blended courses offered are example of this kind that proved to be visionary and critical in the pandemic 2020 not to allow for a disruption of the learning process. According to our statistics, our staff attended sixteen of the CEF online courses and webinars and seven in 2021. Yet, a recent Deutsche Bank survey reveals that 71% of the respondents consider “the lack of in-person team interactions” the most important caveat of the remote working and learning environment. Therefore, I truly hope that very soon we well go back to our conventional mode of interaction, contributing to the development of our people to their full potential.

At the end, on behalf of the Central Bank let me congratulate you on your twenty-year journey, the milestones that you have reached, and your endless energy to promote values, inclusiveness and partnership. Thank you for all your support and initiatives, including this one – a platform envisaged to exchange knowledge of our mission, strategic views and approaches to human resources development.

I wish you an excellent, thought - provoking and fruitful discussion.