This page details the support on the ground offered by the European Commission to cities, regions and Member States, through the Pillars of the Talent Booster Mechanism.
Technical Assistance to help regions facing a ‘talent development trap' to train, attract and retain skilled workers
Pillar 1 of the Talent Booster Mechanism focuses on assisting 11 EU regions strongly affected by the decline of their working-age population as well as the share of tertiary educated individuals, defined by the Communication on Harnessing talent in Europe's Regions as being in a “talent development trap”. The Technical Assistance provided under this pilot project is delivered by the Harnessing Talent Platform (HTP) Secretariat, under the overall coordination of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO). An overall allocation of 80 expert-days will be provided to support each region.
The expert support will help regions facing the consequences of demographic change and brain drain to develop, elaborate, and implement actionable frameworks to attract, develop and retain talent more effectively. Regional and topical experts will be involved in delivering the support to these regions.
The first phase of the technical assistance will be used to develop a more profound understanding of the region’s current capacity to harness talent using a needs & gap assessment. This will help outline any principal challenges related to harnessing talent in each region and evaluate the degree to which the needs of the region are being suitably addressed by the current policies, initiatives, and strategies in place.
This phase will result in the provision of a dedicated strategic roadmap with an actionable framework, which outlines concrete steps to address the gaps identified to attract, retrain and develop talent more effectively.
The second phase of the technical assistance will seek to implement some of the identified actionable next steps. While the type and area of support will depend on the results of the diagnostic phase in each region, an “Implementation Toolbox” will provide different resources, activities and tools from which regions can choose to make use of. The types of support could include, without being limited to:
The thematic area(s) of support will be tailored to the specific needs of each region and may include fields such as: R&I ecosystems, education and training, financial incentives, infrastructure development, healthcare and social services, or quality of life. The support offered to regions will link to Cohesion Policy programming and investments.
This pillar targets regions at risk of falling into a ‘talent development trap’, facing high rates of departure of young people to adapt to the demographic transition and invest in talent development through tailored place-based policies.
Under this pillar, dedicated assistance is provided to 10 selected regions to help them develop spatially oriented, smart policy approaches to address their specific demographic challenges. Support is delivered by experts from the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities and structured as a three-year initiative divided into two main waves, each targeting five EU regions over roughly one and a half years. The first wave of regions will receive dedicated technical assistance from spring 2024 to mid-2025, whilst the second wave will benefit from expert support between mid-2025 and end 2026.
A dedicated final report will be developed for each region, tailored to its needs. It will include analyses and recommendations across key policy sectors, as well as an action plan to guide policy implementation. The analyses, policy recommendations and action plan will consider the role of relevant actors, including local governments, national authorities, and the EU especially through Cohesion Policy, and the integration of regional policies with broader national and EU initiatives.
Subject to their specific needs and priorities, each selected region will benefit from analysis and policy recommendations across the following areas:
Reforms at national and regional level, necessary to address the shrinking of the working-age population, the lack of skills and respond to local market needs.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG REFORM) is launching two Flagship Technical Support Projects, to be implemented as of 2024. The two Flagship Projects will provide technical support to Member States in the field of skills and regional development.
The Flagship Project on Fostering skills development systems aims to support Member State efforts, at both national and sub-national level, to advance skills development through wide-reaching reforms. As part of this Flagship, Member States will be able to apply for support to adapt their education and training systems, strengthen skills governance arrangements, develop methodologies and tools to monitor labour shortages and anticipate skills needs, and implement talent attraction and retention strategies, among other possible measures.
The Flagship Project on Overcoming barriers to regional development aims to support the efforts of the regional authorities, the EU outermost regions and other regions facing constraints such as islands, to define and implement appropriate processes and methodologies to address the development challenges in an integrated manner and by taking into account good practices and lessons learned from other regions.
The Flagships will be launched as part of an annual call for requests from EU Member States. Funding for such projects is provided by the European Commission’s Technical Support Instrument (TSI), the EU programme that provides tailor-made technical expertise to EU Member States to design and implement reforms across a number of policy areas.
Member States applying for support as part of the Flagship on Overcoming Barriers to Regional Development will be able to choose from among the following reform areas:
Under each reform area, applicants will be able to apply for one or more of the following work packages:
Possible support measures under Reform Area 3 (“Harnessing talent and employment opportunities”) include (non-exhaustive):
Member States applying for support as part of the Flagship on Skills will be able to choose from among the following reform areas, depending on their needs:
Boosting innovation and opportunities for high-skill jobs and thus contribute improving possibilities to retain and attract talents.
The I3 Instrument promotes interregional collaboration. It is focused on bringing innovation to a mature level, with a particular aim to develop new value chains in less developed regions and to integrate them into the broader EU value chains.
The policy support provided under this instrument is managed by DG REGIO, while implementation is under direct management by EISMEA (European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency).
The I3 Instrument, as part of the European Regional and Development Fund (ERDF), aims at supporting interregional innovation projects through provision of funding for mature innovation in its commercialisation and scale-up phases. With a total financial allocation of 570 M EUR for 2021-2027 it funds projects for consortia composed of interregional quadruple helix (companies and especially SMEs, academia, public authority, civil society) stakeholders from multiple Member States and regions.
To further support grants n ‘I3 Support Facility’ is expected to be established by 2024 to assist and support innovation actors in less developed regions. This facility will focus on building stronger administrative structures and processes supporting local ecosystem capacities, including through policy experimentation.
Financing place-based solutions led by shrinking cities that address the challenges of developing, retaining and attracting skilled workers.
The European Urban Initiative (EUI) was recently set up under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) to support urban innovation and cities’ capabilities and knowledge to build a sustainable urban development future, and in particular, when making use of Cohesion policy funds available to them.
With a dedicated ERDF budget of EUR 450 million, the European Urban Initiative (EUI) is a novel instrument of the urban dimension of Cohesion policy in the 2021-2027 programming period. The five Policy Objectives of Cohesion policy that focus on Smarter, Greener, More Connected and More Social Europe as well as a Europe closer to Citizens will mobilise substantial investments in urban areas. A minimum 8% of the ERDF resources in each Member State must be invested in priorities and projects selected by cities themselves and based on their own sustainable urban development strategies.
Within this new Cohesion policy frame, the EUI aims at supporting cities to test and develop scalable and transferable innovative ideas and to spread the benefits of tested solutions across Europe, including by making use of the funding available to them under Cohesion policy programmes 2021-2027.
Beyond, the EUI is about supporting capacities of all urban areas across Europe, providing evidence for policy-making and sharing knowledge on sustainable urban development, including via the Urban Agenda for the EU.
The EUI is indirectly managed by the European Commission and the French Region Hauts-de-France. It builds on the Urban Innovative Actions of the 2014-2020 programming period, however, with new features, such as a closer definition of targeted urban innovations and expected impacts, a stronger focus on the sustainability and operational readiness of proposed actions and the support to transfer solutions to other urban areas across the EU.
Funding support is organised through calls for proposals on urban challenges of EU relevance, open to all EU cities and/or their grouping totalling a population of at least 50 000 inhabitants.
The ERDF finances 80% of the costs of selected projects within a maximum of EUR 5 million each. Part of this allocation is earmarked for transfer partnerships in view of the replication, in full or in part, of tested solutions in other cities in Europe to have an even bigger societal impact, especially in cities from least developed and/or in transition regions, most in need of transformation support towards sustainable urban development.
A first call in support to the New European Bauhaus was closed in June 2023 with the selection of 14 projects from 12 Member states.
As part of the Talent Booster Mechanism (pillar 5), a second EUI-innovative actions call (ERDF Budget: EUR 120 million) focusing inter alia on the identification and testing of new solutions for ‘harnessing talent in shrinking cities’ is open from the 31/05/2023 to 5/10/2023.
Demand-driven and short-term capacity building activities can be organised, with peers from elsewhere in the EU and the financing support from the EUI, to help cities to improve and increase their capacity in designing sustainable urban development strategies, policies and projects. City to city exchanges for instance, can mobilise the expertise and knowhow of cities having successfully implemented UIA projects in a recent past to foster jobs and skills in their local economy or new solutions of relevance to attract/retain talents.
Two calls are currently open until Autumn 2023:
Topic description from EUI-Innovative actions call 2 ‘Harnessing talent in shrinking cities’
