Porto Tech Hub, ISEP and Porto City Hall work together to enhance professional skills and to prepare the city for BREXIT
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Next academic year, Porto will host the first Proof of Concept of a postgraduate degree in the areas of information and communication technologies. The swITch program is aimed at graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (CTEM), in order to fight the lack of expertise in areas such as programming or digital skills in the region.
In the long term, the partnership between Porto Tech Hub Association and ISEP, with the support of Porto City Hall, aims to create a "sustainable and dynamic ecosystem of technical knowledge" in the North region of Portugal.
"We are guided by the need and the difficulty in finding personnel equipped with the ICT skills to cope with the demands of the technological world", explained Paula Gomes da Costa, President of Porto Tech Hub Association, who is in charge of Paddy Power Betfair (Blip), and one of the organizations that is experiencing the constraints of such shortage, along with corporations like Farfetch, Critical Software, Euronext or IT Sector, causing brake to productivity improvement.
The consequence of this shortage is, according to the official, a "resource exhaustion", especially in the so called Great Porto, where "there are companies that need 600 people with this professional skills".
The topic was news in the Portuguese weekly Expresso, which wrote about this innovative project sponsored by the City Hall of Porto.
PORTO TECH HUB AND PORTO CITY HALL ARTICULATE BREXIT STRATEGY
Portuguese weekly Expresso also reveals that Porto Tech Hub and the City Hall of Porto are articulating strategies for coping with challenges that arise at each planning stage, as means of "attracting talent from the United Kingdom", taking into account the movements in the labour market motivated by the British exit of the European Union.
"We think that we are able to attract people, taken in to account the wage differential - which is not so great - and the living conditions in Portugal," Paula Gomes da Costa affirms.