Fast Lane Ventures, the Moscow-based serial Internet startup developer, yesterday announced a radical move to address its growing HR needs: the opening of Fast Lane Academia, a regional office in Ivanovo – a city 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow – which will hire and train young specialists to support its portfolio companies.
Fifty Ivanovo graduates and young specialists will undergo intensive training with the experts at Fast Lane’s head office in Moscow. They will then start working in a wide range of areas, from IT support to call-centers to online marketing to design and copywriting.
By the end of 2012, Fast Lane Ventures hopes to have increased the workforce in Fast Lane Academia to 100 employees.
“Our needs for new staff are outpacing what the Moscow labor market currently has to offer,” said Fast Lane Ventures CEO Marina Treshchova. “This is why we have decided to train our staff by ourselves. We cannot expect new hires to have in-depth professional knowledge right away, but the most important thing is their motivation – their readiness to learn, to work quickly and to grow as professionals.”
“We see this as an extremely important step to support the future of our city and the region as a whole,” commented Mikhail Men, governor of the Ivanovo Region. Every year higher education institutions in Ivanovo graduate more than 5,000 specialists.
The lack of qualified human resources appears to be one of the most difficult issues faced by the fast growing Internet industry in Russia, says a report by East-West Digital News. All key positions are affected, from general managers and project managers, e-commerce and e-marketing specialists to IT and fulfillment teams.
