Cyprus has one of the best-educated young workforces in Europe. Roughly six in ten Cypriots aged 25 to 34 hold a university degree, against an EU average below half. That is a generation of engineers, lawyers, analysts and finance people in their late twenties and thirties who already run things that matter, on an island of under a million people.
The problem is not that they have no jobs. The problem is that almost nobody outside their own company knows how good they are.
I have lived in Limassol for more than twenty years and built three companies here. In every one of them, from hosting in 2005 to Servers.com, which I co-founded in 2013, to Palta today, the decisive work was done by people under 40 whose names never left the building. A 33-year-old who runs a team of forty in Limassol or Nicosia is invisible beyond her own office. Recruiters in London, Amsterdam and Dubai are very good at finding people like her, and they make the first offer. We usually find out when she hands in her notice.
What I saw on the committee
This year, I’m one of more than fifty people on the Awards Committee of the CBN Young Dragon Awards. We review nominations from shipping, construction, hospitality, financial services, trading and technology, score them, and select four finalists in each category. After that, the public votes, and the committee score and the public vote carry equal weight. I think that is the right balance: experts filter, the market decides.
What stands out to me is the nominations themselves. Most are written by managers who clearly want their person to be seen and have never had a public place to say so. Some of the strongest come from companies I have never heard of, outside the big Limassol and Nicosia names. There is far more talent in this country than the business pages suggest.
Why an award, of all things
The sceptic's view is that awards are vanity. I understand it. I am not a fan of ceremonies either. But look at it from the two sides that actually matter.
For the person, a public award is credibility they can carry. A recruiter abroad will find their LinkedIn profile anyway. I would rather it said that Cyprus noticed them first.
For the employer, a nomination is the cheapest retention tool I know. It costs a form and an afternoon. Pay rises are expensive and quickly forgotten. Being named in public by your own company, in front of the whole business community, is remembered for years. Most of the good people I have lost over twenty years would have stayed longer if someone senior had said, in public, that their work mattered.
At TechIsland, where I sit on the board, talent comes up at almost every meeting: how to attract it, how to keep it, how to grow it at home. Most of the real answers are slow and structural: schools, housing, skills programmes, permits. Recognition is one of the very few things that works immediately and costs the country nothing. It would be strange not to use it.
What I would ask companies to do before 4 November
The rules are simple. Candidates must be under 40. In the eight professional categories, from technology and financial services to shipping, construction and tourism, the company nominates its own employee, and it can nominate as many people as it wants. Founders can put themselves forward in the Young Entrepreneur category. The deadline is 4 November.
Three things I learned reading several hundred nominations:
• Nominate the person who is not the obvious choice. The head of department will be fine. The 29-year-old who quietly fixed your biggest operational problem may not be.
• Write about outcomes. The committee reads dozens of nominations in a row. The ones that stand out say what changed because of this person: a system rebuilt, a market opened, a team that stopped losing people.
• Tell the candidate you did it. Even if they do not reach the final four, knowing that their manager went to the trouble is worth more than most bonuses.
I would especially like to see nominations from companies outside Limassol and Nicosia, and from sectors that do not usually make the news. Shipping, construction and manufacturing employ a lot of very capable young people who never get a stage.
So my request is simple. If someone in your company deserves it, nominate them before 4 November. It takes an afternoon. It might be the reason they are still in Cyprus five years from now.
Nominations are submitted at cbn-dragonawards.com
One of the founders of TechIsland and a member of its Board of Directors, Alexey Gubarev (also spelled Aleksey Gubarev and Aleksej Gubarev) is an entrepreneur and investor based in Limassol. His career in hosting and infrastructure began in 2005; in 2013 he co-founded Servers.com, sold to CloudOne Digital in July 2023. He is also a co-founder of Palta. More at gubarev.com.
