⦁ Francisco Menéndez Iglesias, Director of the Galician Infrastructure Agency, values the “prudence” with which Galician engineering faces times of crisis “such as the ones we are experiencing” by achieving market niches, maintaining stable work teams, retaining as much as possible knowledge.
Vigo, Thursday, March 31, 2022.- The Director of the Galician Infrastructure Agency, Francisco Menéndez Iglesias, highlighted this Thursday at a working breakfast organized by the Cluster Association of Engineering, Consulting and Technological Services Companies of Galicia, AGEINCO, the “prudence” with which Galician engineering companies face “these moments of black swans” achieving market niches, maintaining their work teams and trying to retain knowledge.
The regional administration and engineering companies have sought meeting points in this forum, analyzing the needs of engineering and architecture in Galicia from different points of view. From the Cluster they remember that the Director of the Galician Infrastructure Agency has always been very receptive and sensitive to his sector. “We have exposed the transformation of AGEINCO to a cluster and how we have expanded our actions with the professional engineering associations (through the CGES), the technology centers and the Universities”, highlighted the president of the Cluster, Daniel Prieto.
Menéndez Iglesias has pointed out that one of the concerns of the Ministry is the current situation, “of notable instability, uncertain and accelerated”. The international context, he said, with the existing armed conflict and the moment after the pandemic condition his work, causing “significant uncertainty in the management of public resources, depending on the economic situation”.
On the other hand, and in a positive way, but with nuances, he has highlighted the opportunity that the NEXT GENERATION funds should represent. From the Ministry “we will try to manage them properly to offer work, knowing the reality of the short deadlines that have been stipulated for it”. In this sense, they present an important commitment to the digitization of roads, with which “it would be possible to manage important information and data that facilitate the subsequent work of engineering and that will contribute to improving the efficiency of public spending, work for which engineering work is considered necessary”. Prieto has assured that it is a real opportunity to which 9 million euros will be allocated; “an authentic market niche for the companies of our association”.
Another line of action of the Galician Infrastructure Agency is the construction of unique buildings, with technical, hospital or cybersecurity specifications; in addition to rehabilitation and energy efficiency.
The focus, as a line of business for engineering, is increasingly on cities and their urban actions, in the field of sustainable mobility, low-emission zones, pedestrianization, naturalization…, for which it is very important to engineering and architecture collaboration with the integration of multidisciplinary teams. In these actions, the “social authorization” is of special importance to carry them out in a consensual manner to the citizens according to the needs claimed.
To conclude, the companies of the Association have warned that being a strategic sector that is not considered adequately valued -the valuations in the specifications do not adjust on many occasions to the real works and the demand for works included in them but not valued- . “We need an adequate assessment of engineering so as not to turn our services into low cost”. For this reason, companies have also shown that it is difficult at the moment to hire trained engineers “With teleworking you can carry out much better paid international projects in other countries, for example, in Italy you pay three times what in Spain, and in the United Kingdom 5 times more”.
Both the Director of the Galician Infrastructure Agency and the Cluster of Engineering, Consulting and Technological Services Companies of Galicia, AGEINCO, agree to maintain fluid and continuous communication in order to improve as much as possible the aspects mentioned and support each other within the posibilities
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