On 25 June, a hall at the Ungheni District Youth Centre did, for a few hours, exactly what policy has failed to do for years: it sat young people who are thinking of leaving across the table from the people who would hire them at home. The “Avanti” association ran the “LevelUP Career Fest 2026” career fair there, drawing nearly 200 young people — final-year pupils, graduates, jobseekers — and more than 20 companies and organisations from the district, with vacancies, internships and training programmes. Germany’s ambassador, the town’s mayor and the district president stopped by the booths too.
Not a notice board, but real people
The difference “Avanti” tried to make was to keep the fair from becoming a mere board of listings. Alongside direct conversations with employers and CVs handed in on the spot, the programme included hands-on sessions on using digital tools and artificial intelligence in a job search, and a series of talks — billed as #CareerTalks — with entrepreneurs, specialists and young professionals recounting their paths.
The association summed up the bet behind this part itself: it set out, it says, to “put forward real people from Ungheni with real stories.” In a town young people leave, that is no accidental choice: instead of figures and slogans, local examples of those who stayed and made it. Or, as “Avanti” framed the invitation, “sometimes the future begins with a simple ‘Hello!’.”
“Avanti” — the Association for Education, Civic Engagement and Progress — is a young organisation, registered in 2025 and led by Alina Butnaru, working out of Ungheni on non-formal education, civic engagement and social entrepreneurship. For a team only a year old, a fair with 200 participants and 20 employers is a serious test of organisation. The association ran the event together with the Ungheni District Youth Centre and the Employment Office, with support from Germany, through the GIZ project “Youth Employment Promotion in Moldova.”
Poster of the career fair organised by the “Avanti” association at the Ungheni District Youth Centre, 25 June 2026.
“An investment in Moldova’s future”
The official messages all pointed the same way. Germany’s ambassador, Hubert Knirsch — on a working visit to Ungheni that day — tied the fair to the bigger stakes:
Investing in young people is investing in the future of the Republic of Moldova. Germany supports initiatives that create employment opportunities, build skills and help young people find their place in the labour market. I am glad to see so many young people and employers gathered in Ungheni to build future prospects together.
Hubert Knirsch, Ambassador of Germany to the Republic of Moldova
Mayor Vitalie Vrabie said the town needs young people who are “active, prepared and involved,” and that a fair like this is a platform for dialogue between young people, employers and institutions. District president Dionisie Ternovschi argued that jobs in the country are becoming more attractive and better paid, so that leaving abroad no longer looks like the only option.
Why a fair like this matters
The stakes these words reach for are ones we documented before the event itself. The number of young people aged 15–34 in Ungheni district has halved in eleven years — from 30,446 in 2014 to 15,166 in 2025 — the district’s average wage is almost a fifth below the national average, and almost a third of young people in the region are neither in school nor in work. The paradox is that jobs do exist: the “Ungheni-Business” Free Economic Zone is the second-largest employer among all the country’s free zones, and hundreds of vacancies are registered in the district.
In other words, the problem is not a lack of offers, but that young people compare themselves not with the neighbouring district but with Chișinău or Bucharest — and pack their bags. A three-hour event does not change that calculation on its own; it cannot raise a wage or restart the district’s industrial engine. What it can do — and did — is catch a young person at the very moment they are weighing whether to leave, and show them, through people like themselves, that a career at home is no joke.
And for a district that finds it ever harder to count its young people, the fact that it was a young association, with volunteers, that set out to bring them all together — employers, institutions and success stories alike — says something good about the Ungheni of today.