In 2013 RisiAlbania conducted an extensive study on the job-matching system in Albania. In so doing, the project discovered that the role of private job-matching providers was weak: there were only a small number of private jobmatching service providers, with very few paying clients, and only around 40-50 recruitments a month. Moreover, providers’ services were underdeveloped,  lacking complementary services such as career guidance […]

In 2013, job-portals were a relatively novel idea in Albania. There were only four main job portals1 that provided limited recruitment (headhunting) and job advertising services. Altogether, these job portals published more than 6,000 job ads per year, with more than 2000 businesses advertising through them. While this meant they were becoming a strong competitor to the print media, which held a monopoly on […]

As the “ambassadors “of a country, tourist guides play a key role in a country’s tourism industry: they interact closely with visitors and are critical in shaping tourists’ impressions of a country. Indeed, a tourist’s positive experience can attract up to three new tourists – a bad experience can deter eight. High-quality tourist guides have therefore the potential to bring in more tourists, […]

Albania’s tourism sector has been growing steadily over the past ten years. The World Travel &Tourism Council (WTTC) estimates that tourism presently accounts for 8.4% of the country’s GDP, supporting some 85’000 jobs. Yet, Albania’s tourism potential has been far from exhausted. For example, during RisiAlbania’s research on the key bottlenecks in the tourism sector, product  development emerged as a key concern. Firstly, current […]

Since 2006, a large number of foreign and local investors started opening call centers in Albania, primarily providing contact center services (namely, telemarketing, teleselling) for the Italian market. In 2016, the sector comprised more than 800 firms, located in the main cities of Tirana, Durres, Shkodra and Vlora, had an estimated annual turnover of €200 million, and employed […]

One of the key constraints in the Albanian IT sector was the shortage of specialized skills, both technical and managerial. There was little advanced expertise in the areas of programming and architecture engineering. The available skills profiles were generally outdated and did not reflect the latest developments in the industry, such as new programming languages […]

Agriculture in Albania remains one of the largest sectors in the country, contributing to 20% of the country’s GDP and employing 50% of the Albanian workforce1. The sector, however, faces a range of challenges: from land fragmentation, limited technological innovation, lack of marketing and export strategies to agroprocessors struggling to access finance. Lack of access […]