Great success of the 10th Be Basque Talent Conference held in MUNICH

• More than 135 professionals and almost thirty Basque organizations participated in this international event
• More than 600 interviews between highly-qualified professionals from Germany and Basque companies were conducted

Last Saturday, the Nemetschek Business Centre in Munich was the venue for the tenth edition of the Be Basque Talent Conference, a meeting organized by Bizkaia Talent to connect companies and organizations with highly-qualified Basque professionals residing in Germany so as to know firsthand about the current and future situation of strategic sectors, as well as the professional career prospects should the emigrated professionals choose to return and/or engage in projects developed in our country.

The event was attended by 135 Basque professionals who work in various sectors such as the automotive industry, aeronautics, machine-tool and engineering services as well as more than twenty companies such as ABB Niessen, Acicae, Ampo, Batz, Beaz, CAF, CIE Automotive, Cikautxo, Danobat Group, Etxe-Tar, FagorArrasate, Gestamp, Ibarmia, ieTeam, IK 4, Loramendi, Maier, Matrici, Mondragon Corporation, Nem Solutions, SPRI, Tecnalia, Ulma, University of the Basque Country and Velatia.

Throughout the day, in addition to the information sessions of these organizations, there were debates, workshops and more than 600 job interviews between the highly-qualified professionals and the Basque Companies.

Bizkaia Talent, with the support of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the rest of the partners in the organization, plays an essential role to provide the conditions required to create nodes which connect companies, universities and organizations with highly-qualified professionals.

The first of these events to connect talent with the productive network took place nine years ago when “the crisis was not yet an issue but the deficit of professionals was, it was the first of the events which later on expanded throughout Europe and especially throughout the United States”, the Economic and Territorial Development Councillor of Bizkaia, Imanol Pradales, explained during the opening ceremony.

Be Basque Talent Network

Bizkaia Talent is consolidating the Be Basque Talent Network to generate networks which connect talent and the productive network. At present it is the largest network of highly-qualified professionals who are or want to be in contact with the social and economic reality of the Basque Country, with more than 9,000 people from almost one hundred countries and more than 280 Basque organizations. This initiative was established in order to deal with two structural challenges: on the one hand, to cope with the need to incorporate talent into a productive network which needs it, and on the other, as regards demography, the number of people who abandon the labour market is larger than the number of people who enter it. In the next few years this situation is going to get worse and thus, there is a need to retain, attract and connect talent.

The director of Bizkaia Talent, Ivan Jimenez, said that “meetings such as this in Munich, one of the main international talent attraction hubs, are framed within the efforts to consolidate the Be Basque Talent Network”. In fact, he added, “by the end of the year there will have been several meetings with Basque professionals in cities with a high concentration of talent which play a leading role in innovation matters, such as the one held on Saturday, in the Bavarian capital, London, Zurich or Dublin”.