Work Week aims to encourage Walloons to find jobs in Flanders

Wallonia and Flanders are teaming up to promote cross-border employment opportunities through the Work Week initiative. They hope to encourage more people from Wallonia to explore job prospects in Flanders.

Wallonia’s employment agency Forem and Flanders’ VDAB will host the event from 14 to 18 October. With a large number of open positions in the Flemish job market, the initiative seeks to bridge the gap between Wallonia’s higher unemployment rate and Flanders’ need for workers in key sectors such as industry, logistics and domestic services.

The event will include four major job fairs in Mouscron, Liège, Zaventem and Wijgmaal. In addition to the fairs, Walloon job seekers will be able to access services such as having their CVs and cover letters translated into Dutch and practising job interviews in the language. 

There are more thna 137,000 available positions on the VDAB website, 32,000 of which require a good knowledge of French. Many of those are in the industry and logistics sectors. 

The Work Week follows a similar initiative launched last year when the VDAB and Forem set a goal of attracting 12,500 Walloons to jobs in Flanders. The regional governments, keen to boost cross-regional labour mobility, formalised their collaboration in 2023 to address these goals.

^{#FlandersNewsService | Illustration picture of a worker in a plant © BELGA PHOTO DAVID STOCKMAN}