Porto creates 47% of Portugal's talent
Attracting young talent to cities has been one of the major challenges facing local councils. As such, many have opted to create strategies that establish a link between the academic world and the world of work. Porto is an example of this.
One of the projects developed by Porto was the TERA project (an acronym for "Talent, Evolve, Retain and Attract"), renamed in 2023 as the "Porto. for Talent" platform. In terms of attracting talent, almost 250,000 visitors consulted the "Porto. for Talent" platform, and around 108,000 applications were submitted.
The City Councillor for the Economy, Employment, and Entrepreneurship, Ricardo Valente, explains what constitutes the platform and what has been done for young talent attraction.
When was the TERA project born and why? What made you want to carry out this project?
"The TERA project was reborn with a new name and designation in 2023. It was essentially a renaming of a talent strategy that already existed in the municipality".
"The data we collected was, in fact, extremely relevant to what followed. At that first moment, we discovered that Porto's outreach region was the one that produced the most talent in the country. In other words, we produced around 47% of the country's talent, while Lisbon's region of influence produced 44%".
"We exported most of this talent. At that moment, we realized that we needed to give people opportunities. We needed to have an investment attraction strategy that would show companies what an asset we had, which was the enormous creation of talent. And, based on this attraction of companies, we needed to ensure that this talent was retained and that new talent was attracted to the region".
"Therefore, TERA (an acronym for "Talent, Evolve, Retain and Attract") seeks to put into practice the municipality's entire strategy, from the point of view of the economy, centered on people. In essence, it's an economy that focuses on people and stands with people. People are a source of talent and they need to be able to have talent that corresponds to the needs of the economy - which is always a challenge because unemployment can also be seen as a lack of job offers or the inability of the market to respond to the demand for skills from an employment point of view".
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