Captación y retención de Talento de los jóvenes: mirada desde las empresas

The Bologna declaration or Bologna process in 1999 for the construction of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) meant for Spanish universities the implementation of a whole series of reforms and changes that affected not only the structure of their teaching, but also teaching methodologies, international mobility, and the concept of guarantees of the learning process. In this sense, learning is no longer only the acquisition of knowledge and theoretical content, but also the development of skills and competencies. Thus, in the EHEA, learning based on competencies becomes the centre of the student's academic path. The definition of these competencies is the decision of higher education institutions and professional bodies. Objectives This paper shows the results of unstructured interviews carried out between 2020 and 2021 with employers from large national and international companies with the aim of identifying the characteristics that define people considered talented. For this purpose, different industrial sectors have been taken into consideration, such as the auditing and consulting sector, the FMCG sector and the biopharmaceutical and chemical sector. Method The methodology chosen for this work is in-depth interviews with people or talent managers of large companies in Spain. It is a qualitative technique and a total of 24 companies from the audit, consulting, biopharmaceutical, and consumer goods sectors took part. Unlike other studies, in the interviews the interviewees were not given a closed list of competencies to choose from but were left free to answer what they considered most appropriate. In the structured interview, a talent conceptualization analysis was conducted for each interviewee and the main competencies they expected to find in a successful job candidate. The interviews were transcribed, and text mining techniques were used to identify common patterns and important differences across sectors. In accordance with standard practices in text mining, the interview scripts, which were considered in the documents that were analysed, were pre-processed, and cleaned to remove stop words, select grammatical categories that could provide more information (i.e., nouns, verbs and adjectives) and normalize the text formatting (removal of symbols, conversion to lowercase...). Word clouds were used for visualization and interpretation. From the analysis of these results we intend to obtain a list of possible new competencies. Results For the grouping, the companies classified by three major sectors were taken into account: Auditing and Consulting, Consumer Goods and Pharmaceutical-Chemicals. The characteristics most in demand by employers and therefore their conceptualization of talent in the audit and consulting sector; the consumer goods sector and the pharmaceutical and chemical sector are shown. Discussion This paper has found that, at present, employers' demands for talent are focused on the search for people who are adaptable, motivated, enthusiastic, hard-working, cooperative, committed, enthusiastic and a good listener. These are competencies that strengthen and facilitate the integration of candidates in organizations. On the other hand, it has also been found that there is a demand for people who work in teams, work on a project basis, are flexible and have analytical skills; these competencies are maintained in candidates over time and coincide with the competencies of the white papers. On the other hand, young people are impatient, or have little patience, it is a common denominator for all companies and all sectors. Impatience can be good for learning and improving, but the problem is the management of this impatience. Closely related to patience is that they ask a lot from the company but are not willing to give anything in return. They defend their rights, but sometimes forget their obligations. Immediacy is a very prominent characteristic of today's young people that employers do not share in the same way or at the same speed. Therefore, impatience management would be one of the competencies to be worked on in all degrees for all professionals of the future. The companies that took part in the study are:: Accenture, Boston Consulting, Deloitte, E&Y, Everis, KPMG, Pwc, AC Marca, Alcon, Almirall, Boehringer Ingelheim, Dermofarm, Eurofragance, Ferrer, Grifols, Uriach, I vascular, Isdin, Kymos, Laboratorios Leti, Medichen, Henkel, Idilia Foods y Nestle (sorted by sector)