According to the World Economic Forum, Dublin has been ranked seventh out of 90 cities for its ability to attract, develop, and retain talent. However, the data shows a significant gulf between capital and the rest of the country.
The ‘Global Talent Competitiveness Index’ (GTCI), which is compiled by the international business school INSTEAD, Dublin ranked ahead of other notable cities including San Francisco, Paris, London and Brussels.
Despite Dublin’s strong performance, Ireland as a whole did not feature among the top 10 countries for talent attraction and retainment, ranking 13th out of the 119 countries in the report.
The data further highlights the challenge for government in shifting high quality jobs beyond the Dublin region – a key pillar of the new Ireland 2040 planning framework.
The study took a look at six factors including the ‘enable’ factor, which looked at the regulatory, market, business and labour landscapes, and whether they help attract people.
The report also examined other factors that included ‘attract’, which gauged the openness of a city or country, ‘grow’ which looked at how well a country or city develops its talent, while ‘retain’ took into account how nice it is to live in a city or country.
The final two factors that the report observed when examining countries were ‘GK skills’ and ‘VT skills’. These measured the availability of workers with vocational and technical (VT) skills and those with global knowledge (GK) skills. Topping the overall ranking is Switzerland, followed by Singapore and the USA.
The report also analysed cities though the ‘be global’ pillar, which examined the internationalisation within a city.
Dublin performed well under headings like ‘enable’, ‘attract’ and ‘be global’, ranking first for its regulatory, market, business and labour landscape, and scoring a top 10 ranking for each of the other two pillars.
European cities swept the board for their ability to attract and retail talent, with the top five positions made up of Zurich, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki.
Earlier this month Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, said that he was returning to Ireland to place a “big bet” on Dublin as the next European centre for technology.
“There’s real engineering and tech talent, but as importantly people want to move to Dublin,” he told the Irish Independent.