29 June 2017
Sarajevo FBiH 

According to Damir Faruk Saracevic, the IT Adviser at the Kanton of Sarajevo, tourism and IT sector are two most neglected industries, which have the biggest potential for development.

Saracevic used to work at Mistral, one of the three biggest IT companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, last year he decided to develop the project of IT schools in Sarajevo Kanton, as the two – years long experience brought many positive results.

According to him “Mistral is one of the three biggest IT companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The business started five years ago with four employees, today it has more than one hundred, and could have had more, if there were enough qualified human resources (on the labor market).”

He says the company has been forced to postpone many projects, because they need more employees, however despite the high unemployment rates in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is not enough qualified human resources who can meet employers’ expectations.

“As the school system in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not provide the adequate education in IT field, we decided to create our own school, which would follow our curricula and educate human resources ready to meet expectations of Mistral clients,” Saracevic continues.

The school has been running for two years. The company started with 10 students, now they have 19 persons who attend their training's.

According to Saracevic 90% of attendants are immediately employable after the training is complete. Currently the project is being implemented in cooperation with the Sarajevo Kanton.

Saracevic sees the project as a chance to address both unemployment, austerity and economic migration.

“The idea is to bring our positive experience on a higher level, and to give the opportunity to unemployed people in BiH to learn this craft, to earn good money, and to stay in their homeland,” Saracevic concluded.

He believes the IT sector has a great potential to grow, and the Balkan region has intelligent people who could easily get involved with the industry.

“We have great potential for the IT sector (development), we have good people who are good workers, we have good time zone, majority of the people in the region speak good English,” however, this potential according to him can be fully developed and used only if it is strengthened trough the regional cooperation. 

Saracevic refers to Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, as countries that used to be less developed than Bosnia and Herzegovina but recognized the potential of the IT sector and today their markets are worth thousands of hundreds of millions of euros.

Currently only Sarajevo Kanton needs and could absorb around 12,000 developers until 2020.

Video Interview with Damir Saracevic