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Talent Attraction and Retention

Among the challenges facing the 21st century city are balancing the demands of the local labor market with the skills of the workforce, striving for full employment opportunity for all individuals at all skill levels, and attracting and retaining both businesses and individuals that form the economic foundation of the city. Accelerating innovation provides cities with greater capacity to address challenges in job creation, housing, transportation, education, and immigration. The objective of this project is to gather and share best practices that accelerate innovation in each respective participating city. Specifically, this year’s topic area is “talent flows” – analyzing the attraction, retention, and loss of workforce participants. Each partner city in WCCP, endowed with many prominent universities and thousands of students, expresses concerns about retaining the potential talent that they produce, a sentiment reinforced by numerous studies, surveys of business leaders, civic dialogues, and panels of experts including one at the first annual WCCP Summit in June 2011. Our research, conducted in an urban spatial framework, analyzes those policies and practices that contribute to retaining the highly-skilled talent that is produced by each partner city.

Download the two page Boston summary here.