ASPIRING applicants for overseas jobs in Poland need no longer fly to Manila to process their Polish visa applications.
This is after BLS International, an outsourcing service provider, opened an application center in Cebu City on Thursday, June 1, 2023, with an exclusive partnership with the Embassy of Poland in Manila.
“For us, the Polish Embassy, we opened this office to facilitate the visa application process for the people from Visayas area and Mindanao,” said Vice Consul Tomasz Danel of Embassy of Poland in Manila on Thursday, June 1, 2023.
According to Danel, Poland is gradually growing in popularity among migrant Filipino workers, thus establishing a center in Cebu can even attract more Filipinos to Poland.
In the visa application center, he said, Filipinos can apply for a Schengen or short-term visa, which is typically for tourists, and a national visa or a work visa.
Need for skilled workers
He disclosed that given Poland’s current demand for skilled workers, obtaining a work visa remains the top choice for Filipinos.
There are currently about 15,000 to 20,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in Poland.
The top five jobs that are available to Filipinos include drivers, pipe fitters, firefighters, construction workers and welders.
Though he did not specify the number of jobs available, Danel said this goes in the thousands.
He said the aging population of Poland and the ongoing war in Ukraine are the reasons why they lack manpower in the workforce.
“We used to have many Ukrainians working in Poland because it is easy for them to cross the border for work,” Danel said, adding that many of the Ukrainian workers have returned home, resulting in a lot of job vacancies.
Numbers doubled
He said the Polish government was able to approve 7,000 work visas last year, of which 2,000 are for skilled workers.
He added that 2022 also saw a hundred percent increase over the number of work visas approved in 2021, which was only over 3,000 work visas.
He said that for this year, they had already approved around 14,000 work visas since January or already double the number of the total number of work visas issued in 2022.
Danel added that this might even hit larger numbers at the end of the year with the opening of the visa application center of BLS International in Cebu City.
He forecasts that there will be 10 to 20 applicants from the Visayas and Mindanao daily that will process their visas in the Cebu City branch. He said that in Manila, it would reach up to 70 per day.
First outside NCR
According to him, this is the first visa application center they had opened outside of the National Capital Region (NCR).
Eloisa Ilagan, country manager of BLS International Philippines, said this will reduce the expense of those applying for a Polish visa, particularly Cebuanos, because they will no longer need to go to Manila unlike before.
She said the visa application center, which is located at the Apple One Equicom Tower in the Cebu Business Park in Cebu City, is expected to cater to an average of 12 applications daily.
Ilagan said that while there are limited spots for the time being, should the demand grow, they may add more daily spots in the future.
For interested visa applicants, Ilagan advises them to book an appointment on their website www.blsinternational.com so they can be served.
She said processing a visa would cost P4,500, excluding the payment for the courier, SMS or text message to be updated of one’s application, and other value-added services, which vary depending on the availed package. (KJF)