Talent City Index Finland report was launched last week in Helsinki
Where would today’s and tomorrow’s qualified workforce prefer to work and live?
It is a question that many municipalities, regions, investors and employers are asking themselves – now that talent shortage is greater than ever throughout many industries.
The Talent City Index report was created to to investigate and benchmark how cities rank against each other in the fierce competition for skilled workforce, to be used as a tool and guidance to improve a city’s attractiveness and retention power.
Download the report for free both in Finnish and Swedish, English version coming soon!
Differences between Finns and Swedes was the hot topic
At the launch event of the report in Helsinki last week, the biggest interest among the people in the room, particularly among the media, was around the differences between the Swedish and Finnish results. Comparison between countries is something that always intrigues people, and there are plans in place to benchmark trends and patterns between countries once more markets have been launched (psst! Germany, Norway, Netherlands and the UK are in the books).
For your convenience, we gathered some of the most interesting differences between the Finnish and Swedish learnings. You may do what you like with the intel.
✅ In Finland, career opportunities and job availability are the most important drivers to move, which is different to Sweden, where life-style is equally, if not more, important.
✅ In Sweden, the coastal cities ranked the highest in attractiveness and retention power, whereas in Finland inland cities were ranking high in the survey. Interestingly enough, Swedish speaking coastal cities were losing residents and were perhaps suffering from lack of awareness among target audience
✅ It is obvious that there is a strong business cluster in and around Helsinki. Helsinki and Espoo are #1 and 2 on the list for people working in business and economics, also among students where Helsinki is dominating. Also Executives prefer Helsinki and Espoo. In Sweden the results were more spread out among the biggest cities.
✅ Tampere is ranking highest in more lifestyle oriented categories though (quality of life, family friendly, safe, sustainable). Jyväskylä also performs well in the more life style oriented categories. Gothenburg ranked the highest in all categories in Sweden, outranking the capital of Stockholm altogether!
✅ A huge surprise from the Finnish results came out within the freelancer category; freelancers are usually more flexible to work remote, and in Sweden we could see many smaller coastal cities ranking high among freelancers, but in Finland, the freelancers ranked the largest cities in Finland highest, similar to the general ranking, with exception for Hyvinkää in top 10 for freelancers.
✅ Municipalities with proximity to larger cities performed really well in the Finnish ranking. That indicates that people are searching for smaller municipalities to live in, with more nature and lower housing and living costs, but still with the proximity to larger cities.
✅ In Sweden it was mainly IT & data specialists and engineers who were most prone to move, while teachers and people in the health care sector were less prone. In Finland we could almost see the opposite, with teachers and medical specialists among those who were more prone to move, and engineers less prone.
✅ The Swedish speaking parts of Finland seem to have a challenge to attract people from the whole of Finland. For example, there is the biggest energy cluster in the Nordics set up in Vaasa, but Vaasa is only ranked number 17 in general ranking, and not in top 10 among engineers. What could be improved to make Vaasa more attractive, and to retain that specific set of people needed there for growth?
