Denmark Struggles to Retain International Graduates:
“Fancy Phrases like ‘International Outlook’ Aren’t Going to Cut It” International students are one of the most obvious solutions to Denmark’s growing need for skilled labour, but too many return home after graduating. If they’re to settle and build lives here, we need to be better at opening our arms—in our corporate culture as well as socially. Written by Erik Lillelund
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t’s not going too badly for Pleo. In just six years, the fintech company has gained over 17,000 business customers and earned itself a place among the unicorns, a.k.a. startups with a valuation of over 1 billion dollars. Pleo has international employees to thank for its growth. Today, 120 of the 165 based at Pleo’s headquarters in Copenhagen are international talents. And of the 75 developers working at the company, only a handful of them are Danes. Which may explain why Pleo’s founder is disappointed by the Ministry of Education and Research’s statistic that almost half (47 percent) of international graduates from 2016 returned home within one year of graduating. “It’s much easier to retain talent when they’ve moved to Denmark to study, and we need them here. We have a huge shortage of talent in Denmark, especially in the digital sector. Danish companies either have to fight over the limited Danish labour force, or we have to get much better at appealing to internationals, who are not only needed for their competences, they also contribute valuable perspectives unlike our own,” says Jeppe Rindom, CEO and co-founder of the Danish fintech Pleo. The digital sector is particularly starved for talent. According to Statistics Denmark, 70 percent of Danish IT companies with more than 10 employees have difficulty recruiting the people they need. “For many companies, something as banal as language can be the biggest barrier to attracting and retaining talent.
Sure, you can write a press release in English that professes the company’s ‘international outlook’, and many companies have an English-speaking executive board, but among the staff, the language is still Danish. It’s such an advantage to start off—as we did—with a mix of nationalities, because then it’s a given that the company culture is open to nonDanes from the get-go,” Rindom explains. Scandinavian students are more likely to return home At Copenhagen Business School, the problem is nothing new. Even though Denmark is generally voted as one of the most popular places to work and study, we need to be better at making use of that popularity, according to Martin Jes Iversen, Associate Professor and Vice Dean of International Education at CBS. “It helps that foreign students generally think that Denmark is a great place to live, and they’re right about that. But we struggle when it comes to language and culture. We need to have a better setup when it comes to the integration of international talent, ensuring that they can go from university to company without too many obstacles,” he says. One surprising trend is that the further an international student has moved to come to Denmark, the more likely it is they’ll stay. On the other hand, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns are much more likely to run straight back to their homelands after graduating, probably because Denmark is not as attractive a country to them.
From University To Unicorn
