10 dec. Local Roundtables Bring Employers and Universities Together Across the TI4DM Consortium
Between October and November 2025, the Talent Inflow 4 Digital Minds (TI4DM) consortium took a decisive step toward its core mission: closing the gap between higher education and the labour market. As part of Work Package 2, each of the four partner universities (Constantin Brâncuși University of Târgu Jiu in Romania, Lietuvos Inžinerijos Kolegija in Lithuania, Instituto Politécnico de Santarém in Portugal, and Goce Delčev University of Štip in North Macedonia) organized its own Local Stakeholders Opportunities Identification Roundtable at home, bringing together employers, public institutions, NGOs, and private sector organizations from its local community.
The response exceeded every expectation. Across the four individual roundtables, the partner universities together brought a combined total of 63 local employers and organizations to the table, each invited to share their perspective on labour market demands, emerging digital job profiles, and potential collaboration opportunities with higher education. Employers spoke openly about the skills they look for in graduates, public institutions outlined regional employment trends, and NGOs shared insights on inclusion and access to opportunities for students facing socio-economic or geographical barriers, the very group TI4DM was designed to support.
What stood out most was the genuine enthusiasm shown by local partners in every country. Organizations expressed a strong willingness not just to attend a single roundtable, but to stay actively involved throughout the life of the project by offering internships, sharing job openings, and mentoring digitally trained students. This momentum has already translated into concrete outcomes: more than 30 partnership agreements have been signed to date across the consortium, with more in progress, laying the groundwork for a growing network of employers ready to welcome TI4DM graduates into the workforce.
Minutes of meetings from all four roundtables are now being consolidated and analysed, led by Lietuvos Inžinerijos Kolegija, to extract shared trends and inform the design of the project’s digital courses and employability tools. This first wave of stakeholder engagement confirms what the TI4DM consortium believed from the start: local communities across Europe are ready and eager to help build a bridge between academic learning and real world digital careers.