In a notoriously tight labour market, attracting and retaining local talent is a crucial mission for many government agencies across Europe. To ensure their region is prospering, these agencies have ambitious plans to captivate talent and support local employers, connecting the dots between the demand for skills and the available skills in their regions.
The challenge
Local agencies are looking to gain a deeper understanding of their local labour market to boost economic growth in their region, and to share these insights with employers and citizens. But in order to do this, these organisations need access to labour market data that is region-specific, current and reliable.
Building a Talent Observatory with Lightcast
Lightcast provides labour market data and customisable dashboards to build public portals that enable users to analyse job postings, occupations, skills, industries, and much more. Furthermore, they can compare data between different regions to do benchmarks and understand how their markets are performing compared to other markets.
These dashboards can be accessed by local employers and institutions, citizens, or even Higher Education providers looking to update their courses to meet market demand. Check out how AQU Catalunya uses its Talent Observatory to support Catalan educational institutions.
The Municipality of Porto - Portugal
The Municipality of Porto has a great focus on supporting local employers and investing in local talent. In May 2020, the Municipality partnered with Lightcast (formerly Emsi Burning Glass) to use its unrivalled data to build its Talent Observatory platform - a key initiative to boost economic growth in Porto.
The user-friendly platform contains key local labour market insights, which are shared among employers, talent organisations, and education and training providers. It serves as an aggregating platform of the talent ecosystem, powering a collaborative governance model between institutions. Building on Lightcast data, the Talent Observatory promotes Porto as a prospering destination for professional development and supports local employers in attracting and retaining talent.
Bizkaia Talent - Spain
Established in 2005, Bizkaia Talent is a not-for-profit organisation supported by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia. The organization partnered with Lightcast in May 2018 to use Lightcast data to build the Basque Talent Observatory, the world’s first publicly available platform to monitor local labour market trends.
Citizens and employers can access a wide array of data, from open vacancies to average advertised salaries, in-demand skills and top local employers and sectors. Using Lightcast data, Bizkaia Talent can engage citizens and improve its KPIs of reattracting top Basque talent into the region.
Commenting on the success of its Talent Observatory platform, Ivan Jiménez Aira, Managing Director at Bizkaia Talent, stated:
“For Bizkaia Talent, the observatory has been an absolutely success when it comes to helping professionals understand the needs of the job market in the Basque Country, and also to help us focus our activities on searching the exact talent companies in our Country are looking for. It used to be about perception, now it’s about reality and that makes a big difference.”
