By Philippine News Agency

Estonia looks to lure some 2,000 IT professionals from non-EU countries over the next five years, according a plan unveiled Monday by Urbe Palo, Estonia’s Minister of Entrepreneurship and IT.

After Estonia’s earlier plan to attract IT professionals from Finland failed because of substantially lower salaries offered in Estonia, Palo has turned her attention to Ukraine where she sees a much bigger potential.

Palo said, however, that it is hard to track how many of the presumed professionals who come from Ukraine actually end up working in the Estonian IT industry and how many move to other sectors like construction.

In addition to the Work in Estonia program, Palo is also planning to form a workgroup that would help the guest workers to settle down in Estonia and solve various day-to-day issues like sending kids to nursery school, etc.

Work in Estonia would be tasked primarily with marketing job opportunities to potential work force outside Estonia.

“We will form a project team like the e-residency team in order to identify the bottlenecks preventing people from coming to work in Estonia,” the minister said.

The ministry intends to allocate around 10 million euros (10.58 million U.S. dollars) to the project over the next five years, from 2018 to 2022.