Early in the morning, buses packed to the brim depart from Plaza Espanya heading to companies such as Agbar, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, HP, IBM, Nestlé, NTT Data, Ocado Technology, Pepsico, Sanofi, Scheider Electric, Softonic, and Zurich. They are occupied by international students who are doing a master's or postgraduate degree in Barcelona, but who have not quite come into contact with the local ecosystem and do not know how to access it. The excursion aims to learn firsthand how companies work that, precisely, have difficulties finding all the digital profiles they need to continue growing, trying to attract potential workers who are already settled in the city and have the necessary training.
Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital), in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council, promotes It.nerary Day, a kind of business tour to reduce the talent gap in the face of an increasingly large demand from the ICT sector. "The digital ecosystem grows above the talent we are capable of generating," says the director of the Digital Talent program at MWCapital, Jordi Arrufí. According to the latest available data, technology companies generated 24,000 job offers in 2021, for which there were only about 10,000 professionals available.
"Although it grows every year, the supply of talent is less elastic than market demand, which can accelerate very quickly and can generate 50% more jobs from one year to the next," explains Arrufí. The creation of new professionals, he emphasizes, has a growth of less than 10% each year. The tool available to the market is, mainly, the academic world, whether from universities and Vocational Training (FP) to the retraining courses of bootcamps. And, to generate new vocations, the result is long-term.
But the talent that the city attracts, one of Europe's main poles of attraction, can also be leveraged. "Not enough has been done for international talent to get to know the ecosystem," says Arrufí. In his opinion, the job fairs organized at universities are more designed for local students and not so much for foreigners: "We let talent leave."
In the second edition of It.nerary Day, some 350 international students participated, boarding buses that took them on a route through different technology companies in the city. Coming from 20 training centers such as the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) or the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the participants represented 70 different nationalities, with a clear predominance of those coming from Latin America, the United States, and China. Seven routes were made, each focusing on different types of companies. The last stop was at Fàbrica Estrella Damm, where they could interview recruiters from the visited multinationals more personally and finally see if they decided to extend their stay in the Catalan capital.