TalentMagnet Improved Institutional Capacities and New Multilevel Governance for Talent Attraction and Retention in the Danube Region

Conferences

KICK-OFF CONFERENCE - 24TH FEBRUARY 2021 - ONLINE FROM NYÍREGYHÁZA, HUNGARY

167 participants from 20 countries worked together in the TalentMagnet conference. We had attendees from many Danube region countries, but also from Spain, France, Jordan, Azerbaidzan. The conference contents reached 26,341 people with its digital contents.

The morning section was targeted for mainly for policy makers, the afternoon section for talents.

We are extremely happy because it seems that we succeeded to provide real added value to our guests. Furthermore, they say: comparing to other online events, TalentMagnet conference was much better, since 63% of the respondents gave the highest possible rate (5), 28% gave 4. And luckily, noone thought it was much worse and boring

Most of the people found the small group interactive session in the afternoon very useful or useful

And our “experiment” on the short entertainment shows of local talents was also liked by the participants. According to our speakers, all of them got high scores: participants appreciated both the quality of the content both the delivery style and engagement.

77 respondents filled in the post conference poll of the TalentMagnet Conference:

Report of the morning session (mainly for policy makers)

In the morning session, Dr. Ferenc Kovács, the mayor of Nyíregyháza shared his warm welcome words with all the participants from more than 20 countries. Then the best Lead Partner ever: Danilo Ceh from ZRS Bistra Ptuj was speaking about the great challenges and amazing partnership of TalentMagnet. 

 

 

 

 

The keynote speaker of the morning section was one of our Founding Fathers, key expert of TalentMagnet, Béla Kézy. Why is it important for smaller cities to deal with talent attraction and retention? The question has been answered by him. The next speaker was Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schuster, former Mayor of Stuttgart. He was talking about how to work together to give talents opportunities in their home regions. His talk is a really great pleasure for us.

Then we started a Good Practice session in the conference to benchmark how others attract and retain talents successfully. 
Ondřej Dostál, Strategic Planning Specialist (City of Ostrava) was talking about the importance of strategic planning in talent attraction and retention, followed by Ana Anžej, Acting Director (SAŠA Incubator Velenje). She was talking about their experiences in helping talents in entrepreneurship: encourageing them to exploit their talents and creating supporting environtment for them. Aisté Valadkienė, Head of Youth Affairs Coordination Group Klaipeda CIty Municipality was talking about their practice in youth and city partnership, youth involvement into city life and works with youth politics implementation in Klaipeda city. Sandra Malenica, Deputy Mayor, City of Varaždin was talking about their housing program for medical workers. Prof. Wolfgang Weber Professor, University of Applied Sciences was talking about the role of universities in talent attraction and retention.

Report of the afternoon session (mainly for young talents)

The aim of the afternoon session was to target young talents from the partner countries and (as a capitalization of our project) from all over the world. It was a great pleasure for us to welcome young talents also from outside the partnership. With the first talk we wanted to show young talents an option, what a city can offer for them. Johanna Huure, director of Helsinki Business Hub was talking about their world famous "90 day finn" program. Then our afternoon keynote speaker, Dr Szabolcs Prónay (associate professor of the Univeryity of Szeged) answered the following questions: How to exploit your talent? Why we think that You Don't Need to Be the Best to Be the Most Wanted? His talk was followed an interesting Q&A session with young talents. 

One of the most important part of the conference was the small table discussion among talents. One mentor and 7 talents in 13 tables were discussing about the most important factors in a city. The results of this session will be built in the following achievements of the project. 

 

 

 

MID-TERM CONFERENCE (COMING SOON)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Programme co-funded by European Union funds (ERDF, IPA, ENI)