Employ Flanders’ productive, multilingual workforce to tackle Brexit challenges

The war for talent has reached its peak. To overcome post-Brexit challenges, your company will have to find people with the right set of skills to support and boost your business success in Europe. To help you achieve this, Flanders’ education system endows employees and researchers with the necessary technical, digital, intellectual and language competencies – and the proof is in the rankings!

Talented workforce that speaks your language

According to various international rankings, people in Flanders are:

  • highly productive – #4 worldwide for labour productivity (US Conference Board).
  • highly skilled – #12 in Europe for digital skills (DESI) and #17 within the OECD for collaborative problem-solving skills (OECD PISA).
  • highly educated – #1 for mathematics, #3 for science literacy, #5 for reading skills in Europe (OECD PISA).

To top it all off, Flanders’ people are multilingual by default. Most are fluent in Belgium’s three official languages – Dutch, French and German – as well as English. In fact, according to Education First’s English Proficiency Index, people in Flanders are the world’s 11th best non-native speakers of the language of Shakespeare & Co.

Optimise your labour costs

When you set up a base in Flanders, you’ll gain access to a variety of employment subsidies and structural social security reductions. And there’s more…

As an employer, you can also benefit from target group reductions for the first employees you recruit in Flanders:

  • a lifelong exemption from paying social security contributions (SSCs) for your first employee hired (for the period between 2016 and 2020);
  • substantial SSC reductions for your next five employees hired (from 2016 onwards).