Municipality launches platform where Talent meets companies and education and training institutions

More than a digital platform, the new tool intends to be an aggregator structure of the talent ecosystem, dynamised through a collaborative governance model. The Talent Observatory is the visible face of a system of management and dissemination of strategic information on the dynamics of the labour market and skills in the macro-region of Porto and North.

For the councillor in charge of the Economy, Employment and Entrepreneurship, "this project will have to be increasingly participative and appropriate, since it was designed for the city, for the companies, for the training entities, for all the agents of the talent ecosystem". Ricardo Valente reinforces the certainty that the Talent Observatory is "a pioneer project at a national and European level".

It should be recalled that this initiative of the municipality has already received recognition from the European Commission, having been highlighted in the first publication of the series of that institution dedicated to innovative initiatives in the context of the Urban Agenda Partnerships.

For the Commission, the "ambitious initiative" of Porto. For Talent is the "jewel in the crown" of the city's strategy, as it "will act as a one-stop-shop for all aspects related to jobs and skills" for employers and workers.

"As well as providing a snapshot of digital labour market supply and demand, [the Observatory] will analyse current and future skills needs. It will also explore related issues such as wages and employment conditions," the publication details.

In practice, the platform collects data on the dynamics of talent from different perspectives (supply, demand and training) on a municipal scale, for the entire Northern region, combining multiple sources and data collection tools such as official statistics, studies, web scraping, together with the proposal of a shared governance model, make the Observatory a robust tool to support the decision of each of the agents of the ecosystem.

The Observatory has already scheduled a series of initiatives such as the creation of an advisory board, sectorial meetings and studies. At the presentation of the platform at M.Ou.Co, where the exhibition "Where talent meets" by the photographer João Cabral was inaugurated, the current handball coach of Futebol Clube do Porto, Magnus Andersson, who participated as a talent manager and Olympic medalist, recalled how "the attraction, development and retention of talent, associated with management, are aspects of nuclear dimension for the sporting and economic viability of clubs in their current context".