Nordic Life Science 1
76 Jennie Ekbeck, CEO, Umeå Biotech Incubator led
ge nation. Sweden is disadvantaged when it comes to international recruitments: we are geographically remote, with a climate that is not to everyone’s liking, and with a language spoken by few. Our goal must be to make it easier, not harder, to recruit talents and to make it easier, not harder, to keep these talents so that they can contribute with their knowledge and innovative power to the Swedish society,” writes Ottersen. Nonetheless, an OECD report produced in 2019 measuring Indicators of Talent Attractiveness scores across seven dimensions including quality of opportunities, inclusiveness and how difficult it is for prospective migrants with required skills to obtain a residence permit, highlights Sweden, Norway and Finland as some of the most attractive OECD countries for talents, but that all countries can improve their attractiveness in the global competition for talent. Everybody needs to be engaged According to Helena Strigård, in the long-term perspective, the skills shortages cannot be eased without measures from decision makers in the public field. “Here and now, I do believe the industry itself should work together as much as it can to address the shortage. A prominent example of how this could be done is demonstrated by Umeå, home of a rapidly growing life science cluster, where companies collaborate to put demands on local policy makers on how to make the region more attractive as a place to live and work but also to share expertise in an intelligent way. This is something that we at SwedenBIO try to encourage through our platforms as well. Sharing is caring was coined in our community long ago!” The overwhelming message from each opinion group is that we must continue to build on a model of collaboration and shared learning, we must be open to change and realize that the way we addressed skills shortages and talent supply in the past does not necessarily have relevance in todays setting. We must challenge our assumptions regarding what is needed. To do that we need to talk with each other much more than we do today. As Magnus Björsne aptly concludes, “The key message is that we all have to do a bit more. It is not on one party, everybody needs to be engaged, we all need to get together in the boat otherwise we will lose our competitive power, it’s as simple as that.” NLS CAREERS PHOTO MALIN GRÖNBORG