Refugee Talent Hub skills 900 refugees in the Netherlands
Accenture · 2023 · Community
Supported by the Accenture Netherlands Foundation, the employee-founded Refugee Talent Hub skilled approximately 900 refugees in fiscal 2023, leading to more than 290 employment opportunities.
An employee-born idea that became a national bridge to work
The Refugee Talent Hub did not start in a boardroom. It began with Accenture employees in the Netherlands who wanted to help newcomers translate their skills into Dutch jobs. That initiative has since grown into one of Accenture's most concrete community programs in the country.
In its fiscal 2023, with the support of the Accenture Netherlands Foundation, the Refugee Talent Hub skilled approximately 900 refugees. According to Accenture, that skilling work led to more than 290 employment opportunities.
The model is straightforward: help refugees grow their professional network, advance their skills, and connect directly with employers who are ready to hire. Rather than treating refugees as recipients of charity, the Hub treats them as talent that the labour market has failed to reach.
The numbers behind fiscal 2023
- Approximately 900 refugees skilled in the Netherlands.
- More than 290 employment opportunities generated as a result.
- Backing from the Accenture Netherlands Foundation, the company's local philanthropic vehicle.
Those figures matter because refugee employment is one of the hardest gaps to close. Language barriers, unrecognised qualifications, and thin professional networks routinely keep skilled newcomers out of work for years. A roughly one-in-three conversion from skilling to an employment opportunity is a meaningful outcome in that context.
How the Hub works with employers
The Refugee Talent Hub has grown beyond Accenture into an independent foundation with a wide network of committed employers. Its premise is to bring companies and refugee jobseekers together directly, so that meetings lead to real openings rather than generic training with no destination.
Accenture has described the Hub as founded by its people in the Netherlands, and continues to support it through the Accenture Netherlands Foundation. The broader network now spans dozens of Dutch employers who open doors to interviews, mentoring, and skilling programmes for refugee talent.
Part of a much larger skilling agenda
The Refugee Talent Hub sits inside Accenture's global Skills to Succeed initiative, which focuses on preparing people for work and entrepreneurship. In fiscal 2023, programmes supported by Skills to Succeed reported equipping approximately 4.3 million people worldwide with skills toward employment or entrepreneurship, and the company's free Skills to Succeed Academy skilled roughly 80,000 people globally that year.
Refugee support is a recurring thread across that work. In the same reporting period, Accenture:
- Committed, as a member of the Tent Partnership for Refugees, to help skill and support an estimated 16,000 refugee jobseekers and migrants and to hire 100 refugees across Europe over three years.
- Partnered with Welcome.US to mobilise private-sector and community support for refugee resettlement in the United States.
- Worked with Upwardly Global to support the economic resilience of 1,000 displaced Ukrainian refugees through job coaching, readiness, language, and technical training.
Why it matters
Refugee employment programmes speak directly to the UN Sustainable Development Goals on decent work and economic growth (SDG 8) and reduced inequalities (SDG 10). They also address a practical business reality: ageing European economies face persistent labour shortages, and skilled refugees are an underused answer to that gap.
For an outsourcing and professional-services firm whose core asset is people, the logic is consistent. Accenture is applying the same skilling machinery it uses to build its workforce to a population the mainstream labour market keeps missing. The employee origins of the Refugee Talent Hub also point to something harder to manufacture from the top down: a programme that staff chose to build, and that a corporate foundation then chose to scale.