Over the coming weeks, The Danish Dispatch will bring a series of interviews with mayors across Denmark about what they are doing to attract, integrate, and retain internationals in their municipalities.
“This year, as mayor, I went to a large meeting with the business community. I asked them: if you were to give me points to work on as mayor, what would you ask for? Frankly, number one was attracting labour and the right skills.”
Those are the words of the Mayor of Kolding Municipality, Jakob Ville from the Venstre party, when The Danish Dispatch visited him to speak about what his municipality is doing for internationals.
Kolding is located in Southern Jutland and is part of the Triangle Region (Trekantsområdet) cooperation of municipalities. The latest data from Statistics Denmark suggests that 11.2% of the population has foreign citizenship.
Is it important for Kolding Municipality to attract internationals?
“It is very important. We are the first municipality you reach when you travel up from Germany and north through Denmark, which is growing both in population and in living standards.
“Many of our businesses are owned by international companies. A lot of the skills we need are supplied by international workers.”
Ville notes that the business sector in the municipality is especially crying out for internationals and the skills they bring with them.
He explains that he was at a meeting with the top of the business sector in the municipality earlier in the year, where the stakeholders made clear that the number one priority for them was attracting more internationals.
“It helps us get those specialised skills. It helps us stay competitive and stable.
“We were just talking to a company that has had to open a branch in Copenhagen. They would like to keep the rest of the company here. They have a small department in Copenhagen with ten employees, because they cannot get those skills here.
“And they say it is inefficient to run two departments this way. So we have to do something outside the big cities of Odense, Aarhus and Aalborg if we want to meet those expectations.”
What is Kolding Municipality doing to help attract, integrate, and retain internationals?
Ville notes that the Municipal Council recently held a welcome reception for recent internationals who moved to the municipality, which was attended by roughly 300 people.
He also lists several other initiatives: “Language education, language school, job centres; we also have a programme to help accompanying spouses find employment.”
This last point is one that many internationals will recognise. He expands: “If a company attracts someone from India and they bring their partner, and the partner is at home, what can we offer to help them?
“We make a special effort, because we found that when someone comes to Kolding for a good job, if the partner does not put down roots, they move back home.
“If we make a special effort to help the partner put down roots, that helps keep them here. So we make a very targeted effort to get people to stay.”
On other initiatives he notes, “We have a website where everything is published in English. We distribute materials in English at educational institutions, and there are many students there.
“A good example of doing something so people feel welcome is what we call Newcomer Information Meetings. We run that in cooperation with education, business, language schools and a kind of recruitment service, and we have established working groups.
“We try to get out and reach different groups, because internationals here are as different as everyone else. It is about meeting people where they are. We started a few years ago, but we have given it particular priority this year.
“When we have been out and talked to company representatives, they say it is number one on the agenda. Then we have to do what we can to support it.”
What does the Municipality do in terms of education for international families?
Kolding has an IB line in its local secondary school. There are many English-language courses through the University of Southern Denmark in Kolding; however, there is no primary international school.
Ville said, “We are looking into an international school. We are in a dilemma. We tried it at a time when it didn’t really work out.
“We are in a different place now, where more people want it. But we have a large international company, Lego, in a neighbouring municipality, that attracts a lot of employees. They have a school there, and if you live in Egtved, near Vester Nebel, in the north, you are actually quite close to Billund.
“We have the IB at Kolding Gymnasium, but they have just opened one in Vejle, and that will put pressure on us. We have to be careful about competition between Kolding and Vejle.
“Instead of competing with each other, we should be better at collaborating and creating good offers together. I would rather make a really good offer and work together on it.”
From your experience working with these initiatives, what do you find is the most important thing for internationals?
“That you feel welcome when you arrive. It is easy to be an outsider in Denmark from Monday to Friday. It is hard from Friday to Monday.
“How do we, as a society, include people through association life? How do you join a club or association, become part of the community, and take responsibility? When you go out on Friday night or Saturday morning, where do you go and who do you connect with?
“We’ve spoken to several companies. A company may only have two or three people who come from abroad. But if you put together three or four companies that each have three, then you could actually do something together.”
