The Economic Board is the lead partner for the Regio Deal project ‘Working Together Towards a Labour Market That Works’. Over the next three years, a specially assembled team will work on driving forward and scaling up projects relating to training, upskilling and retaining talent in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region. This Regio Deal project forms part of the implementation of the Human Capital Agreement.
Adam Galijašević is the programme manager who coordinates the project and oversees its implementation. Adam explains what this project focuses on and what sort of activities are planned.
He is working on this project alongside two project managers – Ruth Klein for Energy and Kim Hooiveld for High Tech – a communications adviser, a support staff member and two strategists, Renate Bouwman and Corine Bos, who are both available one day a week from their own organisations.
Regio Deal project
As sponsor, you ensure that the project is realised and justified. That means taking care of the realisation and scaling up of various projects in the region with themes such as Lifelong Development, Attracting and retaining talent and deploying Unused Labour Potential. But also practical matters, such as making sure the state aid test is done, monitoring and accounting to the province.
Galijašević says: "Apart from that, I have to keep all noses in one direction, because everyone thinks something about this. There are a lot of partners and parties who sometimes think: I'll do it myself. So you have to direct it and make sure people work together. There are lots of plans, lots of organisations want to do something themselves. How do you make them look beyond their own interests to the common interest? A lot of companies have their own training schools from the company perspective, but if we want to achieve the necessary scale, we really have to start working together. Let's make sure that one plus one becomes three. I am convinced it can be done. At IPKW, for example, we see that applicants who are not selected at one company are forwarded to another company, where the match is much better. That's how you work together to make the most of every talent."
Shaping education together with companies
Galijašević explains that the Regio Deal project will implement the region’s Human Capital Agreement, which was concluded last year (see box below).
One of the pillars of that agreement is Lifelong Learning. “The question is: which skills will we still need in ten years’ time, and which may be less relevant? So how do you ensure that you become and remain relevant in your profession? It means you may need to develop different skills. And some professions will simply disappear. Retraining for careers in health, energy and high-tech is therefore essential.”
This is why we focus on involving companies in shaping education. For an educational institution, it quickly takes four years to revise the curriculum. So you actually have to move much more towards a system in which you continue to think together about what skills are (or will be) needed and how to organise that flexibly and modularly. A system in which you also work more with practical assignments at colleges and universities, so that those students know what it's all about on the shop floor."
The knife cuts both ways
With regard to the ‘Untapped Labour Potential’ pillar, Galijašević notes that it actually involves two distinct issues. Sometimes it concerns people who are on the sidelines and do not have a job. But it often also concerns people who are already in work and wish to develop their skills or find employment elsewhere. If you give these people the opportunity to develop themselves, they benefit as individuals – by gaining greater job security and a better income – and at the same time, you achieve the desired effect of them being able to fill many of the roles for which there are currently too few people.
Coalitions and projects
"We do not implement projects ourselves. We do help build the coalitions for that, draw up plans or secure funding for it. Or if those coalitions already exist, we can give them a budget to set up a structural project, or to run innovative trajectories. We encourage by deploying quartermasters, expanding the network and helping to scale up existing projects.
Take ROC Nijmegen’s Junior Technovium, for example. There, hundreds of children get to experience what it’s like to work or study in the technical sector. That’s a winning formula. We’re now scaling this up to Wijchen, where a new Technovium has just been launched. With funding from the Regio Deal, we are able to cover part of the start-up budget. We are doing this in partnership with businesses in the region.
Another example is the Energy Practorium, which ROC Nijmegen and RijnIJssel are set to establish jointly. The practoraat is intended to give a boost to technical training programmes focused on the energy transition. This will be achieved by identifying the current challenges faced by the companies involved, determining which innovations are needed and reforming the curriculum accordingly.
“We are now going to appoint a project initiator. They will draw up a plan. And with that plan, they will submit an application to the regional investment fund in The Hague. The aim is to set up this practoraat using funding from businesses and central government.
We’ll ensure this plan comes to fruition and, once that’s done, ROC Nijmegen and RijnIJssel will roll out the practoraat. Those educational institutions have the expertise; we don’t. So we’ll make sure they can do their job. Or, to put it more strongly, that initiatives are set up which they consider important, but which they are unable to undertake due to a lack of capacity.”
Contact
Please contact Adam Galijašević: +31 6 18 33 02 03 or a.galijasevic@theeconomicboard.com
About the Human Capital Accord
The Regio Deal project is based on the three pillars of the Human Capital Agreement and focuses on the three regional clusters: Energy, Health and High Tech.
In 2023, The Economic Board, the Green Metropolitan Region, the province of Gelderland and dozens of partners from business and education signed the Human Capital Agreement (HCA) to address labour market challenges.
The agreement defined three pillars:
1. Lifelong Development
This revolves around retraining and upskilling workers to keep their skills up to date or retraining themselves as lateral entrants.
2. Attracting and retaining talent
This is about ensuring that people from outside the region come here to work. And to ensure that people educated in the region continue to study and work here. Or keeping people already working in the region here.
3. Unused labour potential
On the one hand, this concerns people who currently do not have a job, and on the other hand it gives people more perspective on the labour market.
