Transformations  in
Business & Economics

INFORMATION SYSTEMS SKILLS AND IT OFFSHORING IN ROMANIA
Marin Fotache, Florin Dumitriu, Valerica Greavu-Serban

ABSTRACT. IT outsourcing has become a dominant phenomenon in today's computing industry. Due to the lower costs, geographical and cultural proximity, skills of graduates and language proficiency, Romania and other Eastern-European countries have become an increasingly attractive market for the IT services offshoring. This paper is based on a survey targeting Information Systems (IS) graduates of the Al.I.Cuza University of Iasi Romania. The respondents answered questions about their employers and the IT projects they work on and assessed the utility of main courses for their professional career. The Exploratory Factor Analysis suggested that there exist two latent factors related to the course utility, and these factors were compared to the popular IT skills classifications in IS literature. Based on the factor loadings, two scores were computed for each observation and compared at the sample level. The results suggested a higher ranking of technical content in IS curricula, which is different to what has been generally emphasized in western IS programmes curricula .

KEYWORDS: IT offshoring, IT/Information Systems (IS) skills, IS education, Exploratory Factor Analysis.

JEL classification: I23, I25, F66, J23, J24.