A renewable energy developer in Lisbon needs a BIM coordinator for an offshore wind substation. A fintech-adjacent manufacturer in Vilnius needs an SAP S/4HANA consultant to migrate off a legacy ECC system. A plant-engineering firm in Munich needs both, and needed them yesterday. Three different cities, three different labour markets, one identical outcome: the local search comes up short. That pattern, repeating itself across Western, Southern, and Northern Europe at once, is why engineering firms from Portugal to Lithuania to Germany are increasingly building their BIM and SAP capacity in India rather than fighting each other over the same shrinking domestic bench.
Lisbon: A Booming Pipeline That Still Can’t Keep Up
Portugal’s engineering market looks healthy on paper. The sector is adding thousands of new positions a year, led by renewable energy, civil infrastructure, and software engineering, and the country continues to produce strong STEM enrolment numbers. Portugal’s engineering job market grew 18% year-over-year in 2026, with renewable energy and tech sectors leading demand. Yet growth is outrunning supply. More than eight in ten employers in Portugal now report difficulty hiring, placing the country in the global top five for talent shortages, and the president of the Portuguese Engineers’ Association has publicly warned that major infrastructure projects — including the new Lisbon airport and the Third Tagus Crossing — need stronger engineering teams and workers recruited from abroad to stay on schedule. For firms trying to staff BIM coordination on projects of that scale, the local bench simply isn’t deep enough.
Vilnius: A Fast-Growing Hub Still Short on Specialists
Lithuania tells a similar story from a smaller base. The number of IT specialists in the country has grown to 70,600, yet employers still face a shortage of more than 7,600 qualified workers. The gap isn’t confined to software: Vilnius region reports a short supply of electrical engineers, electrical engineering technicians, and process control technicians, exactly the profile many BIM and industrial-automation roles draw from. Lithuania isn’t alone in feeling this — Eurostat data shows more than 60% of EU enterprises that tried to recruit ICT specialists ran into difficulty filling the vacancy, which is part of why the country has kept expanding its own list of shortage occupations year over year.
Munich: Where the SAP Gap Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Germany’s case is the sharpest, precisely because SAP is a German company. Despite that, Germany’s domestic SAP workforce sits near just 20,000 people, while India now holds a large SAP talent pool outside Germany itself — a gap made worse by a wave of engineering retirements the country can already see coming. Munich firms chasing S/4HANA migration consultants or BIM coordinators for plant expansions are competing for the same thin slice of local supply that Lisbon and Vilnius are also drawing from, just with a bigger price tag attached.
The Common Thread: Depth, Not Just Cost
What connects these three cities isn’t that Europe’s engineering base has gotten weaker — it’s that project pipelines have grown faster than any single national talent pool can supply. India offers what none of these markets can replicate alone: a large, English-speaking engineering graduate base, a maturing BIM adoption curve across Indian AEC firms, and, critically, a large SAP-skilled workforce outside Germany. Add a working-hours overlap that runs roughly 3.5 to 4.5 hours ahead of most of Europe, and the case stops looking like outsourcing and starts looking like straightforward capacity planning. It’s the same logic behind why Vandey’s AEC Engineering practice has seen steady demand from clients across Portugal, the Baltics, and Germany building out BIM depth remotely, and why interest in SAP-specific hiring has followed the same curve.
Doing It Right: Compliance Comes First
The one thing that doesn’t change from Lisbon to Vilnius to Munich is that hiring Indian engineers directly, without a compliant structure, creates the same exposure everywhere: misclassification risk, payroll complexity, and no clean path to statutory benefits. This is where an Employer of Record earns its place. Rather than setting up an Indian entity or building HR infrastructure from a European head office, firms can hire compliantly through Vandey Global’s Employment Services, which cover sourcing through Recruitment Services, payroll, and ongoing HR management as one continuous process — so building a BIM or SAP team in India stays a hiring decision, not a legal project. Firms still weighing an Indian entity against a lighter-touch entry point can work through both options via Market Entry Support before committing.
Conclusion
Lisbon’s infrastructure boom, Vilnius’s fast-scaling tech sector, and Munich’s SAP legacy migrations are three different stories with the same ending: European engineering firms are running out of local BIM and SAP capacity at the exact moment demand is accelerating. India isn’t a workaround to that problem — it’s the market with the depth to solve it, provided the hiring is done through a structure built to handle it properly.
FAQs
1. Is this shift specific to Germany, or is it happening across Europe?
It’s broader than Germany. Portugal and Lithuania are both running official shortage-occupation lists that include engineering and ICT roles, and both are actively recruiting from abroad to close the gap.
2. Why does India specifically come up for BIM and SAP roles?
India combines a large English-speaking engineering graduate base with a large SAP-skilled workforce outside Germany itself, plus a growing base of BIM-trained AEC professionals — a combination few single European markets can match.
3. Does the time zone make real-time collaboration difficult?
Not significantly. India’s working hours overlap by roughly 3.5 to 4.5 hours with most of Western and Central Europe, enough for daily standups and live collaboration windows.
4. How do firms in Portugal or Lithuania hire in India without setting up a local entity?
Through an Employer of Record, which legally employs the Indian talent, handles payroll and statutory compliance, and lets the hiring firm direct the day-to-day work without registering a subsidiary.
5. What roles are most in demand across these markets?
BIM coordinators and Revit/Navisworks specialists for infrastructure and industrial projects, and SAP S/4HANA or cloud migration consultants for firms moving off legacy ECC systems.
