Editorial

The evolution of the Romanian woodprocessing industry during the last 10-15 years and the explosion of top-technologies on the internal market, lead to visible and undesired differences between the technological level of this economic sector and the level of technical knowledge of those involved.
The Romanian higher education system in the field relies on a relatively small number of students, so that the annual "infusion" of trained specialists into the industrial sector is much lower than required by the present rhythm of development. If we also take into consideration that, out of this small number of trained specialists, many get employed in totally different domains, and others cross the borders, leaving towards other countries, one can very well understand that the annual infusion of trained specialists into the industrial sector is much too low.
So, the question is: what can be done?
It has been proved that both from economic and time viewpoints, a technical updating of specialists who graduated the faculty more than 10 years ago is the most efficient way to solve this problem. This is the reason why the concept of "continuing education" was launched. Of course, this concept has a much wider area of capitalizing human resources, reaching from "cyclic refreshment" of knowledge to total change of the initially gained skills.
The Faculty of Wood Industry in Brasov, the only accredited higher education institution in this field in Romania, has seized the gap between the rhythm of development of the infrastructure (technical endowment) in woodprocessing enterprises and the knowledge level of the human resources involved, which acts as a "brake" within the technological process and also at management level.
In order to unblock the situation, the faculty supported by national professional associations (APMR, ASFOR) has prepared teaching materials, logistics and teaching human resources, to perform cyclic continuing education courses at national-wide scale, meant not only to update technical knowledge of older graduates, but also to develop new skills, to enable their orientation towards narrow, but highly requested specializations, with promising future applicability, such as: technologies for improving wood properties, wood preservation, wood restoration, computer-aided design of products and technologies, evaluation of processing accuracy, quality assessment in wood industry, use of numerically-controlled machines, computer-aided production planning, global management systems, professional analysis of equipment offers etc.
This "on request" education system - rapid and most efficient - which already works well in highly developed counties, should also raise the interest of Romanian woodprocessing companies, considering that the specialist sent to attend these courses misses just for a very short time from the enterprise and his come-back can be only useful and benefitting for the employer.

Prof.Dr.Eng. Ivan CISMARU
President of Managerial Board of PRO LIGNO Foundation