Barcelona Digital Talent, an alliance for positioning Barcelona as a hub to promote digital skills

December 13, 2018

Barcelona Digital Talent, the initiative for positioning the city of Barcelona as a pole for digital talent, starts operating today. This new proposal is intended to attract and retain both local and international digital professionals with a view to filling the gap in the city for digital talent and to respond to the rise in technology-based business that requires profiles with digital skills.

The founding partners of this alliance, formed by both public and private institutions, include Mobile World Capital Barcelona, Cercle Tecnològic de Catalunya, Barcelona Tech City, 22@Network, Foment del Treball Nacional, the Government of Catalonia and Barcelona City Hall. It also has the support and collaboration of GSMA. It is the first public-private alliance in Barcelona to generate more and better digital talent who will work on a coordinated basis and with a common strategy while optimising efforts.

The Barcelona Digital Talent programme will focus on the following four areas of action: developing the skills of non-digital talent to turn it into digital talent, attracting international professionals, encouraging the adaptation of existing training programmes based on the digital skills required by the market, and boosting new generations’ digital interest and training. Barcelona Digital Talent therefore seeks to reduce the gap there is currently between the demand for digital professionals and the profiles available in the city of Barcelona.

Turning Barcelona into the capital for digital talent with the status of other European poles such as London, Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris is one of the programme’s main objectives. It makes complete sense as Barcelona is already one of the zones in southern Europe with the highest number of innovation hubs, like the Nestlé or the Zurich hubs. Barcelona is also the base for successful start-ups such as Wallapop, Letgo and Glovo, and the venue for international digital fairs and congresses like MWC.

Present and future of digital talent

Barcelona Digital Talent encourages analysis of the digital talent in Barcelona through the application of marketing intelligence. The initiative will study the exact nature of the gap between supply and demand. It will specifically detect the skills in greatest demand among digital professionals in Barcelona, inform the market of which emerging skills will be required in the future, and give pointers as to which international markets to turn to with a view to attracting talent. In the coming months, Barcelona Digital Talent will present a tool with which to interpret all these data and to help decisions in order to fulfil the proposed objectives.

Barcelona Digital Talent will also generate an annual report that will monitor the evolution of digital talent in the city. In the first half of 2019, the alliance will launch an X-ray of the status of digital talent in Barcelona in 2018. This will provide a basis to guide the initiative’s initial lines of action. The data collected to date show that from September to November 2018, demand for technology profiles grew by 40% compared to the same period last year, and rose from 2,834 offers to 3,964, while the professionals available only increased by 7.5%, from 1,099 professionals to 1,182.

The initiative is also working on a handbook of present and future digital professions, which will be based on market analysis and enable the development of training in the digital skills for which there is greatest demand at present and in the future. The project will be undertaken in the first half of 2019 and involve corporations, start-ups, technology suppliers, digital innovation hubs and training centres.