Among the EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe, Romania has the largest outsourced call centre industry by headcount. At the same time, very few Romanian firms provide formal training to their staff. For a team leader or trainer, those two facts say a lot about a new agent's first month. This guide brings together Eurostat data and the EU occupation classification ESCO and shows what is worth practising.
How the industry is structured
As across the EU, Romania has two kinds of contact centre, and the statistics count them separately.
- In-house teams. A bank, telecom operator, energy company or online shop runs its own line. Its staff are counted in the parent company's industry.
- Outsourced providers. A specialist company handles calls on behalf of other firms. In the Romanian CAEN classification this is class 82.2, call centre activities.
Eurostat's structural business statistics show 754 enterprises in class 82.2 in Romania in 2024, with 24,969 persons employed. In 2022 there were 659 enterprises and 25,153 persons. The number of firms is growing, and the average firm has about 33 people. For comparison, Poland had 16,393 people in the same class, Czechia 8,735 and Hungary 3,662.
Many people also work in in-house teams. The EU Labour Force Survey counts 63,700 people employed in Romania in 2024 in ISCO sub-major group 42, customer services clerks. The group includes contact centre staff as well as receptionists, enquiry clerks and travel agents, so it is not an exact agent headcount. Telephone sales belong to a separate group (ISCO 5244).
Languages served
Romanian is the base. For foreign-language projects, the data deserve a careful read. In Eurostat's Adult Education Survey (2022), 40.1% of Romanian clerical, service and sales workers aged 25 to 64 knew no foreign language, against an EU average of 23.5%. The Romanian 2022 data have a break in series, and the value for three or more languages is not reliable enough to publish.
The practical conclusion: an agent who speaks a foreign language well is a scarce resource that is hard to replace. That person deserves investment, especially for difficult calls in that language.
Roles and career paths
ESCO is based on the international ISCO-08 classification, which is also the starting point of Romania's national classification of occupations (COR). The Romanian ESCO names show the steps:
| Step | Role (ESCO) | ISCO-08 group |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Call centre agent (telephone sales) | 5244 |
| Entry | Customer contact centre information clerk | 4222 |
| Specialist | Call centre quality auditor, call centre analyst | 3341 |
| Team lead | Call centre supervisor, contact centre supervisor | 3341 |
| Management | Call centre manager, contact centre manager | 3341, 1439 |
Following these roles, the path runs from agent to quality control or to a supervisor position. An agent with a strong foreign language can also assess and coach calls in that language, which opens the specialist role sooner.
Training challenges
Few firms train formally. In the 2020 Continuing Vocational Training Survey, only 17.5% of Romanian enterprises provided continuing vocational training, the lowest value among the EU countries covered in this series (EU average: 67.4%). Those who took part in courses spent 32.6 hours in them on average (EU: 22.5; 2020 was a pandemic year). Training exists, but it reaches few people.
Fast growth, new team leaders. When the number of firms grows, so does the number of new teams. A supervisor promoted from the agent ranks learns to coach on the job.
The difficult call in a foreign language. An ordinary conversation in English is one thing. An irritated customer who talks fast and interrupts is another. That can only be practised out loud.
New projects, short deadlines. A new client for an outsourcing firm means a new product to learn. Time for conversation practice is easily lost between product training and the first real calls.
One line to practise
For an irritated customer who keeps interrupting:
"I understand this is frustrating. Let me sum up what happened so we can fix it properly the first time."
Say it out loud five times, in Romanian and then in the language you work in most.
Practising these calls with DIRI AI
With DIRI AI an agent practises a call by voice with an AI customer that is clearly labelled as AI and fictional, then reads a report on what to say better. In Romanian, practice uses prepared scenarios, including customer service and complaint calls. It works in 11 languages, so the same type of call can be practised in a foreign language too. There is a Free plan; see the pricing page.
Related pages: sales call centre team training, complaint handling call training and foreign-language sales call practice.
Sources
All sources were read on 9 November 2026.
- Eurostat, Enterprises by detailed NACE Rev. 2 activity (sbs_ovw_act), class N82.2, 2022 and 2024. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sbs_ovw_act/default/table
- Eurostat, Employed persons by detailed occupation, ISCO-08 two digit (lfsa_egai2d), OC42, 2024. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/lfsa_egai2d/default/table
- Eurostat, Persons knowing foreign languages by occupation (edat_aes_l25), 2022. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/edat_aes_l25/default/table
- Eurostat, CVTS 2020 (trng_cvt_01s, trng_cvt_25s). https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/trng_cvt_25s/default/table
- European Commission, ESCO, call centre occupations. https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en/classification/occupation?uri=http://data.europa.eu/esco/occupation/0ededdc2-050a-4ec3-8e70-6295105fcd19