In the spring, over 150 local businesses in the municipality of Boden responded to a survey. Their needs and growth are now being monitored in terms of skills provision and other business development.

The large participation in the latest business survey in the municipality provides good feedback and signals. This helps the municipality’s and Boden Business Park’s business and skills development team to sharpen and target the help correctly.

Among other things, the companies have described their recruitment needs, how they currently retain and find employees, whether they intend to expand and whether they need any kind of support.

The business developers and the skills team follow up the survey with interviews and visits.

“We are now making company visits in response to the survey to provide what we call the toolbox. There are many different ways for an employer to retain, develop and also attract and recruit new employees,” explains Stina Leden, process manager for skills management.

Different routes to support are packaged according to the needs and wishes of businesses. This can include how they find relevant staffing agencies, how employers can influence training, and how they find employees who want to move to Boden. For the business community, it also involves network meetings, land issues, etc.

In summary, the business developers see the following trends:

• The skills development areas that most companies need to develop are marketing, attractive employer, sustainability and digitalization.
• The majority of participating companies consider that their company is well informed about the green transition.
• More than 50 percent responded that they believe their company’s ability to do more business is positively affected by the green transition.
• Important development areas to equip the company include working strategically with skills supply, keeping up to date with what is happening, strengthening existing networks and creating new networks/integrating with the major upcoming players.

Reaching potential migrants

The needs of local businesses and the skills of potential movers are brought together on the website flyttatillboden.se. The municipality of Boden offers a service where employers can set up their own page to reach people who want to move to Boden. The website flyttatillboden.se has about 60,000 unique visitors, 3,000 returning visitors and about 200-300 talents per month who contact the municipality of Boden.

The service for entrepreneurs, available at https://flyttatillboden.se/hej-arbetsgivare/, is free of charge and relies on capturing interests in life and work from visitors to the website.

Great interest

Before the summer, over 500 people had expressed interest in coming to Boden to work. Examples of interested parties who have provided information include

• 70 construction workers
• 40 people with training and experience in health care
• 50 who work in sales, purchasing and marketing
• 60 in the transport sector
• … and many more.

“There are several important elements required for a person to choose to move to Boden – a job, a home and, above all, a rich life. Our website flyttatillboden.se offers a good way in for both those of us who know Boden and for employers who want to encourage people to move here,” says Stina Leden.

Housing, associations and more are also communicated via flyttatillboden.se.