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Young Poles leave UK to return home as economy booms
https://www.ft.com/content/2329a046-...2-5661783e5589
Young Poles leave UK to return home as economy booms
OCTOBER 27, 2017 by Joshua Chaffin in Warsaw
A year ago, Marta Tondera was another Polish expat living in London, still shocked by the Brexit vote and trying to understand its ramifications.
Now Ms Tondera, 24, is back in Warsaw. In March, she moved home after taking a job at the philanthropic foundation of a large pharmaceuticals company.
She has just about finished furnishing her new flat and, for the first time in years, she was not sharing it with a parade of roommates. Another benefit of Warsaw life: her one-hour London commute has been reduced to about 15 minutes.
“It was all very sudden. I feel like I just left my life,” Ms Tondera said of her move.
While the Brexit vote prompted her to reconsider her future, the decisive factor in her repatriation, she said, was the sudden emergence of an opportunity she could not refuse back home. “It’s a dream job,” she said.
Many young and highly educated Poles are making similar moves, motivated by some combination of Brexit’s push and the pull of a thriving Polish economy that is hungry for their talents and experience. In some cases, they are trading the professional prestige of London for the comfort of home.
One indication of the trend is an annual conference that Boston Consulting Group inaugurated in London six years ago to link the roughly 7,000 Polish students in the UK with employers in Warsaw.
At first, BCG struggled to fill the room. But this year the 500-seat venue was oversubscribed by eager students. “They feel they can take the capital they’ve built working and studying in the UK and turn it into a faster career path [in Poland],” Filip Karasiewicz, a BCG consultant explained.
Mr Karasiewicz, 24, has first-hand experience. After studying at Imperial College and then working for Barclays bank in London he returned to Warsaw in September. He worried that leaving London might be perceived by some Poles as a failure but ultimately decided the opportunity at BCG would give him room to grow. The Brexit vote was also more than incidental to his thinking.
“It didn’t exactly change the landscape but it definitely planted some seeds,” Mr Karasiewicz said.
For other recent repatriates, Brexit was not a motivating factor. “I’m not sure it was a consideration in the grand scheme of things,” said Piotr Wetmanski, who left London in August, after eight years, to create a new strategy team at Bank Pekao, one of Poland’s largest banks.
He was filling a position that did not exist a few years ago but is increasingly becoming available in a country experiencing record-low unemployment after a decade of strong growth.
Poland’s GDP grew by 3.9 per cent in the second quarter, after a 4 per cent annual expansion in the first three months of this year. “Everything is peaking here,” Mr Wetmanski remarked.
As banks and other companies reconsider their global operations and shift investment out of the UK, Poland is benefiting. JPMorgan last month announced plans to create 3,000 back office jobs in Warsaw. Goldman Sachs has also been hiring.
One selling point for potential recruits, according to Nina Halabuz, BCG’s head of marketing, is the opportunity to participate in the development of their own country. There is also the gentler quality of life in Warsaw. “You can have children earlier, and I think this is really important to the younger generation,” she said.
The downsides include dealing with Poland’s still formidable bureaucracy and the risk that their career paths may not ultimately reach the heights of those who remained in London.
Asked how the repatriates tended to fare, Ms Halabuz suspected not much different from other young professionals with great talent — and expectations: “Some of them are very thrilled — some are disappointed.”
Przemyslaw Chojecki moved back to Warsaw in March to start an artificial intelligence business after spending five years in Paris earning a doctorate in maths and then two years at Oxford as a research fellow.
His aim is to develop software that will allow computers to analyse and evaluate mathematical proofs — a specialised task that would open the way for a host of other applications.
He regarded the Brexit vote as “the signal: you are not as welcome as you thought you were”.
Still, Mr Chojecki’s decision to return home was less about leaving the UK than experiencing what he considers a “golden period” for Warsaw. “Even though I was abroad, I was seeing Poland changing as well — being more open, more international. It’s fascinating,” he said of a city that now features a mish-mash of modern office buildings, blocky Soviet architecture and hipsters.
Skype and social media had allowed him to bridge the distance between his base in Warsaw and start-up capital and collaborators elsewhere in Europe.
Coming to grips with Poland’s rightwing government has been more complicated. Its crackdown on the judiciary and women’s rights has inflamed many liberal, well-educated Poles.
Many, including Mr Chojecki, say it has also — so far — proved an effective steward of the economy. Mateusz Morawiecki, the deputy prime minister, has been a supporter of start-ups and an enthusiastic recruiter for corporate Poland, even attending the BCG forum in London.
“It’s definitely different but I don’t feel repressed,” Mr Chojecki said.
“I think in London it’s easier to be different — in any way,” she said.
Asked what else she missed about the UK, she replied: “Everything . . . I even miss British food — you won’t believe that.”
Her own return was “not all nice and smooth,” Ms Tondera admitted. But after seven months, she seemed to have few regrets. She was enjoying her job and building a circle of friends. Many, like herself, were back in Warsaw after years abroad.
“I feel like it’s a very exciting time in Poland. There are so many things that are changing,” she said. Then added: “I think Poland needs us to come back.”
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Originally Posted by Francesco Lanza
United Kingdom
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