The long recession encountered by the Romanian economy in the last years has dramatically changed the job market for graduate young people. Only about 10% of engineering graduates are able to find jobs in the first year after graduation. The growth of the percentage of the unemployed people has created great difficulties for mature former employees to find a new place of work. A distinct approach has to be made for the energy efficient lighting in Romania as a Central European country under the pressure of the former East European Communist block for about a half a century. The lighting installations of the greatest majority of buildings and cities are characterised by very low illuminance levels, poor lighting quality, and high energy consumption. The lighting quality is a part of the quality of human life. The European specialists discuss about an increase of the energy-efficiency of lighting systems, starting from a good current state of facts. In Romania, about all existing interior and public lighting installations are out of normal standards. We need to (almost totally) modernise lighting installations by their refurbishment, to introduce energy-efficient measures (according to the inhabitants' requirement and in correlation with the daylight), to promote the lighting maintenance (generally ignored even today). There are four matters that have arisen as a result of an analysis of many cases: the improvement of the existing old lighting, the development of a lighting quality and maintenance system, the increase of the daylight use, the accomplishment of an energy-efficient approach.
The question is "Do we have the means for doing all of these?". The first answer is set by the state of fact of the lighting education in our country. The training of a specialist in light and lighting engineering is realised in the technical universities by a course of Electrical Installations with about 20% devoted to lighting, in the fourth year of study. There is a postgraduate course in lighting engineering at the UTCB - Universitatea Tehnica de Constructii (Technical University of Civil Engineering) Faculty of Building Installations, Bucharest, where the co-ordinator of this proposed CMEs project has developed a teaching co-operation. Being the only postgraduate course in country, the participation is very difficult for the people living far. A short postgraduate lighting course is developing nowadays in the UTCN. Entitled "Lighting Installations Management", it covers a limited area of topics. And the second answer is done by an intense activity for information and prospection on the lighting reality in foreign countries, at the university departments, enterprises and photometric laboratories during the last years. The members of the UTCN team have developed a gradual activity by participating at international conferences and symposiums, research stages, short visits, scientific activity under the frame of individual mobility grants - TEMPUS, DAAD, SOROS, Ministry of Education of Spain, a joint activity with a PECO-JOULE contract, a ROMLISS programme and a personal invitation to the LBNL - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Many direct contacts with university staff, lighting institutions (The Institution of Lighting Engineers - Rugby, England), international bodies (CIE - Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage - Vienna), lighting companies (Philips, Siemens, AEG, Tridonic) were established. So, we had the possibility to obtain more information about the ways to follow in order to obtain successful results in our preparatory activity to develop new postgraduate courses for continuous or alternative formation of the employees, to help our students to have contacts with the job market, to obtain information and scientific materials.
© Prof.dr. Florin Pop