Swiss engineering consultancy to double staff levels at Lithuanian office

One of Switzerland’s leading engineering design consultancies, CSD Ingenieure, has announced plans to substantially expand its operations in Lithuania. Whilst the firm’s Lithuanian sister company, CSD Inžinieriai, has been meeting orders for the local market for over ten years, its role is set to be transformed through a major investment and recruitment drive. It will become an integrated design services centre, servicing customers in both local and international markets. As a result of this shift, personnel levels in the Lithuanian office are set to more than double in the next five years, with most of the new recruits being highly skilled design specialists.

The CSD group, which was established in the 1960s, is a leading Swiss design consultancy with a network of 30 offices worldwide, giving it a truly global reach. And the company now expects its Lithuanian branch to grow considerably by 2020. It is aiming to have a team of 25 designers and specialists in place by 2016, a figure it then hopes to double within the next five years. Significantly, this growth will be mostly in the office’s design department. The company is currently recruiting multi-talented employees possessing both excellent technical knowledge and developed language skills in English, French or German.

This recruitment drive, and the opportunity to building an internationally-oriented career with the Swiss consultancy, is encouraging skilled, ambitious Lithuanian specialists currently living abroad to return to the Baltic State. Tomas Strazdauskas is one such case, having returned to Lithuania to head up CSD Inžinieriai’s structural department, a role which has a number of high-end responsibilities. These include overseeing the expansion of the structural unit, designing structures, developing building information modelling (BIM) projects and ensuring quality levels meet CSD’s high standards. Mr Strazdauskas believes CSD Inžinieriai has huge growth potential, and offers Lithuanian employees unique international career development opportunities since the company works in locations like Switzerland, Germany and Russia.

Mantas Katinas, general manager of Invest Lithuania, a foreign direct investment development agency, also attests to the increase in talented Lithuanians returning from abroad thanks to the new opportunities foreign investors are creating. “We have had many situations where a Lithuanian wishing to come back to Lithuania actually prompts a company to set up an entire unit in the country. We have also seen foreign investors who are considering setting up here specifically target Lithuanians with international experience, encouraging them to return. The growing number of highly qualified specialists returning illustrates the fact that Lithuania can offer talented specialists top international careers. They also benefit from the high quality of life here, and working conditions which are equivalent to similar positions abroad. In addition, specialists who bring their foreign experience are also in high demand and help to fuel improvement in local employees as well,” Mr Katinas explained.

For Mr Katinas, a key aspect of increasing Lithuania’s global competitiveness is the continued attraction of talent with international experience, because they apply the experience they have gained abroad to the Lithuanian context. “Of course the business environment plays a very important role, but today most investors choose Lithuania for its highly-talented workers,” he points out. “Therefore, the answer to the question of what we should do to attract more high added-value investments from abroad is obvious. We must keep attracting and developing top international talent.”