 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our session on youth and prosperity. My name is Sean Rush. I'm the president and CEO of JA Worldwide. We're a youth development organization that works with about 11 million young people in 120 countries around the world. Just some housekeeping items before we get started. This session is being webcast live, and so those of you in the audience or those of you who may be watching on the web, you can pose questions, email. You can email your question or comment to youth. Y-O-U-T-H at wef-w-e-f dot com. Or if you'd like to post a type of tweet here in China, you can post to Weibo and the hashtag is pound or hash, depending upon what part of the world you come from. W-E-F youth, Y-O-U-T-H. You can tweet on Twitter. It's the same hashtag, so feel free during the session to pose any questions you might have. The session will be conducted in English, and so those of you who need a translation, your headset, you can tune to Channel 2 for Mandarin Chinese and Channel 3 for Japanese. So let's get started with the session. The overriding theme of this meeting of the new champions here in Zhenjin is creating the future economy, and a big part of that future economy is going to be youth. It's human capital will be a major part of how the new economy is shaped, and youth will be a huge part of that. The world reached its seventh billionth person earlier this year, but the median age of that population is 27, which means that half of the world's population is under the age of 27. It's the biggest cohort of youth in the history of mankind. But that cohort of youth is facing some challenges due to the current economy. Global youth unemployment according to the International Labor Organization is nearly 13%. 75 million youth around the world are unemployed, but there are some variations in that. You go to different parts of the world. In the developed world, though, that unemployment rate is roughly 16%. Latin America, it's nearly 15%, but the Middle East and North Africa hover around 29% to 27%. Yet in East Asia and South Asia, where we are here, it's below 10% in the nine. So there's huge variation, but there is a large problem around the world. There's also, I think, a mismatch of skills, because as you talk to CEOs and other corporations, there are jobs available in many parts of the world, but the gap between what CEOs need in terms of skills and what's available in the marketplace is great. There's also, because of this unemployment issue, a trust deficit, as some people have called it, in the traditional institutions that have served us over time. And that trust deficit played itself out among young people over the last couple of years through the Occupy movement, which we all saw around the world. We saw it in the Arab Spring a couple of years ago, and it was driven by, I think, youth disaffection in those parts of the world. And now, additionally, while there's been progress against the millennium goals created by the UN, yet there are still 60 million young people around the world who do not have access to any form of education. At the same time, given those challenges, this is the most technologically sophisticated generation in the history of the world. They were born on the Internet, they've grown up on the World Wide Web, and they use social media and technologies in a stunning manner in ways that even the creators of those technologies didn't imagine. And yet, as we have heard here many times during this week on different panels, this generation thinks and acts differently than prior generations, and they see the world, they see business, they see employment in very novel and different ways. So with that context and that backdrop, I'd like to pose the question to our panel of how should society engage young people in shaping the new economy. So I'm going to pose my first question to the panel, and we have a great panel to help us with that. To my left, we have Dong Xia, who is Deputy Secretary General of the All China Youth Federation in the People's Republic of China. To her left is Jaime Vez, President of Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China for Cisco Systems in the USA. To his left is Michelle Tanmeyi, Associate at the Kazana National, which is a strategic investment organization in Malaysia, but she's also created a think tank in Malaysia that will allow young people to begin to participate in the formation of public policy. To her left is Chris Kirk, who will be answering the first question. He is Chief Executive Officer of GEMS Education Solutions in the United Kingdom. And finally, to his left is Andrea Carafa, who is founder and Executive Director of the Green Young Economy in Belgium. Two of these people, Michelle and Andrea, are global shapers, which is a group of young people between the ages of 20 and 30 here at the Forum, who have been identified around the world to be developed and nurtured and mentored through the Forum's activities. So back to Chris, and let me pose that question to you, and that is, how do we engage these young people in shaping the global economy, given that context? Well, Sean, what I'd like to do is start by thinking about the roles that schools can play in this, a lot of the interventions might come after young people have actually left education or around the educational process, but I would like to suggest that there's a lot more that we can be doing actually within schooling itself. And my organization works with governments and school systems right around the world, so we get quite a broad perspective on what's happening in this area. And in addition, GEMS itself runs its own schools in different parts of the world. And we've really spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. A lot of our schools are in the Middle East and North Africa. And for children growing up in that region, how you can create a world of peace is very much on their mind. And they're also very aware of those stark statistics, Sean, that you gave around youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa. It's a huge issue. One thing that really strikes us is that in many ways our traditional education systems are quite broken. When you think about what it was that people needed to be able to know and do and how they would behave, when you go back 20, 50, 100 years, it was so different from the digital generation that are growing up now. There was a point in time when in many parts of the world you would have a relatively elite tier of people for whom actually sort of knowing things that the rest of the population did not know was a mark of distinction and a lot of our education processes were geared towards giving them those advantages. And then another large group of people who were destined for the factories, for the industrial world, for whom that knowledge was not so important and actually being able to perform tasks in a certain way was important. Really in many parts of the world, those days they're either gone or they are going to be receding quickly. And we did a new kind of education. And what I'd like to argue is that that education can foster entrepreneurship and a spirit of achievement right from the start. And I'd like to argue that if we can think about the values, the knowledge, the skills and what it is people can actually do as a result of education in a new way, we can give young people a much better start. In terms of values, we have to teach people that risk-taking is not only not a bad thing, it's actually a necessary and inevitable thing and that actually being able to take risks in the right way is a key life skill these days. And not only that, but that understanding rights and responsibilities right from the start is a very practical and meaningful objective for an education system. And, you know, we've talked a little bit about youth parliaments. There are lots of different ways in which you can foster that sense of trading rights and responsibilities. For example, in some of our schools children would actually sit down and work out, okay, for our school what is the carbon footprint? How are we using our resources? How could we improve that? Give the children a chance to work that through as a real practical and real problem and then engage in making decisions about their schools. What are we going to trade off in order to improve this? Using the curriculum in a way that allows them to apply that knowledge to make some real decisions makes it much more relevant. In terms of skills, you know, we can really move from a model of children in receive mode to children in switched on and thinking mode. For example, why is the teacher teaching? Actually, why do we not support children to think about how to structure a lesson, deliver a lesson and then get feedback on the lesson? With the teacher really just facilitating and supporting that process, let's think about how to help them action plan on things like waste management, practical skills like that. In terms of the knowledge side of this, you know, there are so many opportunities within the regular curriculum to embed different ways in which people can have life skills. For example, in some of the exercises I just described, maths is a really key important topic. But if we learn it purely as an abstract, children do not see the relevance of it. If we're using it to solve practical real world problems, not just to think about them but actually contribute to them, then it becomes real and they'll be much more absorbed in the process of learning the skills. And in terms of beyond the curriculum, you know, why stop with mathematics, English languages? We can be fostering children who are not just adoring pictures but are actually becoming artists and thinking about how they would create and display their own exhibitions and how can they approach that both as an artist and as a business person. We can be creating architects who can be thinking about the design of their school and we can be creating people who don't just learn about cooking skills but actually want to become chefs. Let's see if we can make something which we can actually sell. Let's have days when student food can be made available. And then how do we put all of that into practice? There are a number of great schemes around the world. Sean, in the UK we know your scheme as Young Enterprise and in many of our different schools around the world, Young Enterprise is a fundamental cornerstone to how we get children of an older age to actually think about practical business projects. We also use the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, which rewards young people for doing service in their community and applying those skills in a way that makes a difference to the people around them. I'd like to suggest if we could really support school systems to embed so many of these things into the way that children are educated right from the start, it could make a huge difference to the way that young people are thinking about life. Thank you. Michelle, you're creating a think tank in Malaysia to engage young people in the formation of public policy. What's your take on how to engage young people in the new economy? I think we need to take a step back before we think about how and think about why are youth not engaging currently. So there are two aspects to that I think. One that they simply are disengaged, what I like to call disengaged, which means they just don't care or don't have the capacity to care about issues concerning the world nowadays. Now, that could be because they either don't have the right, they don't have the kind of amenities to do so, their basic concern is just to get, you know, what's next? What's my income for the next day? How do I get food? And that's the bottom, you know, bottom percent of the population. Now that requires a different approach. And the second group are people who want to make a change. They know that they have a role to play, but they just can't play it because there is no platform to do so. And that is really what my think tank, as you mentioned, is actually trying to do. So those people I call the disenchanted youth, the people who have or want to do something but can't do anything. Now, why are youth disenchanted? I think it's a very important question. So it could be because of your education system. Now Chris brought up some very interesting points about investing in skills. But also we need to build the kind of character for youth, you know, to have them realize that they play a role in the world economy nowadays, but also to facilitate that kind of discussion in the schools themselves. So what happens in Malaysia is that I think it's a very Asian culture that when you are young, you're told to do what you're told to do, only what you're told to do. It's a bit of a roundabout thing, but you know, you don't ask questions unless you're asked a question. So there is no independent thought in the process. And in Malaysia until very recently we had this Universities and University College Act, which prohibited students from participating in any political activity in universities. Now you would have thought that university students are the mature students who would be able to engage in good discussion. But if you have that kind of restriction, you're actually inhibiting independent thought. And that is a very, very key part of learning and growing up as youth. And also the Asian culture I mentioned, you're not allowed to ask questions. So how are you going to ask the big issues that concern us today? How are you going to say, well, what about this new idea or that new idea? Because you have no way of expressing yourself or you're just not encouraged to. So that is a very important issue that we should address as well. And so it's very important to provide a platform for students because nowadays youth who feel that they can't assist in anything to do with public policy, they'll think, well, why do I stay in this country? Why not just go abroad? So we have a lot of Malaysian students who migrate overseas after they study because they think that there are better opportunities for them to contribute elsewhere. So the first step to engaging youth, I think, is to provide the kind of platform for students who are disenchanted, make them realize that there is a role to play and we are listening to you. So don't dismiss students as just people who are young and inexperienced because, to be honest, there is a lot that we can learn from them. Great. So you're saying create a platform, create a vehicle for them to provide input. Yeah. Dong Jia, your deputy secretary general of the All China Youth Federation, you reached 300 million Chinese youth. Tell us your perspective from the People's Republic. Okay. I think engaging young people is one of our missions as an umbrella organization through our 55 member organizations. But I think starting from this conference, we are not only to engage young people, but we should also making young people take the lead. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made his definition of what is new champions in his opening remark. Young people is one of the four elements that he mentioned first. Actually, we find that the audience here, I think, is a good complex mix of both young people and senior participants. I'm one of those. Because engaging young people is not enough. That's what I think from Chinese view that we should make young people take the lead. From our experiences, we think that engaging young people is not a contemporary or temporary solution. It should be an attitude, a commitment. What we need most is resources is mentioned, capacity is mentioned, but what I think most is a culture. A culture which is think young people is the resources, not the problem. Think young people is not only the future, but also the now. A culture that empowering young people and giving them not only importance by voices, but also their real power in decision making process. So the political structure, the social culture and the policy processes, all these needs to be built together to build a system which can enabling young people to take the lead and engaging them. In some areas, if you can't give them a favorable condition, at least you give them equal opportunities. So that's the general cause. I always have the feeling that this iPad generation, they knew more than us about what is new economy. But it is the adult who don't use iPad or who don't use all this way board who is making decisions. So it's not a time about only engaging, but how to be retreating and giving young people more flow. One of my takeaways from that is that you're viewing young people not as a problem, but as a resource. Culturally, for China it is. If you see Chinese history, not the old part, if you see the Republic history of China after we abandoned the Empress in the early 20th century, it is youth movement. It is young people taking the lead in setting up the Republic, in setting up the People's Republic of China, in starting up the reform and opening up process of China. It is this youth movement, maybe not in the typical form of revolution, but in the form of fully engaging, participating, taking the lead, having a career ladder in their careers. They have hope. And I think that's consistent with what Premier Wen-jen Bao said in his opening remarks to the forum, where they're providing free compulsory education through grade nine here in China, and they're providing financial aid so that no young person would have to drop out of school due to poverty. So it's a consistent message. So, Jaime, you're from Spain. You were educated in Mexico. You've worked for a number of technology companies, but right now Cisco for quite a period of time. You have overseen operations in Latin America. You're now overseeing those operations here in the East. So you have a unique perspective on a lot of different things. And from Cisco's perspective, talk a little bit about how the world should be engaging young people. So let me try to frame this in the context of two things. First, the tremendous opportunity we have for the younger generations. I understand that we all talk about unemployment, but I try to frame it more as an opportunity for them. Second, what are the key things that the industry and the governments are doing in general to pretty much address the mismatch that you talked about? But third, also what are the younger generations suspecting from the industry, from the companies, in order to be successful? And you mentioned that I've had opportunity in Latin America and Asia, but everywhere I go, every meeting that we attended, we talked about talent scarcity. It is a fact that the companies are talking that talent today is not enough to drive the technology, create the infrastructure that has to be put in place to make our countries more competitive and in order to drive productivity. Obviously technology, we believe, is one of those key enablers of productivity and we face these challenges of talent scarcity on a daily basis. Now, we feel it, but what's the data behind it? So just let me share two data points that are critical. I'm using IDC information and manpower information. Number one, Latin America, in order to deploy all the technology required just in communication, today needs over 150,000 people to deploy the basic technology. Second, the manpower analysis survey 2012, 34% of 40,000 companies that were interviewed believe that they have difficulty in gathering talent to meet their needs. Now the double click on this one is where? And the first reaction would be emerging markets. But let me share which are some countries out of the top 15. Japan, US, Germany, Brazil, India, Mexico. It's all over the place. It does not really differentiate if it's developed or emerging. And an interesting data point in 2010, 10% of the companies interviewed in the US said they had difficulty. 2012, 49% believed that they're having issues to hire people. So what a tremendous opportunity for the younger generations. And it is summarized in three concepts, skills mismatch, experience mismatch, and location mismatch. And that's why this is such a huge opportunity for younger generations because of the flexibility, adaptive capacity, and ability to learn that younger generations have today. Now what are the solutions? Obviously, leverage technology to be global. Just move people from one place to the other or hire virtual, be a technology so you can actually do the job in other places of the world. Second, retrain and retrain and retrain. Companies are doing more and more training of people, not only for themselves, but for the industry. Cisco in this case, that's not what we call Cisco, at Working Academy, it's shown you and I talked about it in the past. Over 250,000 younger people are being trained today on APJC on a yearly basis. That's the investment we have to make for the future. And their idea is like, you know, getideas.org training for the 21st century where the industry is together working with government and with academia to train people to minimize the skills mismatch. So obviously a lot of opportunity and solutions being put in place by companies leveraging technology, but with a commitment to deploy those resources. But let's assume for a second that we have everybody, all the younger generations in our company. What is the challenge we face? It's not only hire, it's retain them because younger generations' expectations are completely different. It's not about the desk, the computer, and the chair. It's about bringing their own device, having the opportunity to work from anywhere, being connected 100% of the time, and their management expectations, from their management, it's not you're going to tell me how to do it, you're going to give me the opportunity to do it by interacting with multiple people in the company and outside the company in a collaborative way so you can actually get the results of what I do. Driving tremendous innovation. For that, I want to say what Michelle said, it is the company role to build the platform to enable these younger generations to be successful so we capture the innovation, we let them be actually be successful and really grow together with them. So it's also putting the platform for them to enable them for a future in the companies. So what I hear you saying, Jaime, is that there are great opportunities, there are jobs, but for reasons of geography or skill sets, there are mismatches and there needs to be some way to bridge those mismatches in the relocation. Alright, Andrea, you are Italian. You're working in Belgium, but you see the world in what you're doing. You are, have created the Green Young Economy Organization, which is a not-for-profit organization that's designed to empower young people to innovate around the topic of sustainability. What is your take on how to engage young people? You're a global shaper as Michelle. You're part of the generation we're talking about. Talk to us. I think the very first point is, again, how to inspire young people to take action, how to motivate them, how to fuel action because probably the concern we are facing today is that young people have lost this motivation, have lost really the passion that usually young people should have. So, as I said yesterday in the session on the future of education, one day I was asked, who is your best teacher ever? I thought about it only for a few seconds and then I realized that it was a peer and it was even a couple of years younger than me. And actually I think probably one of the reasons why I'm here today is that this friend of mine, because now we are friends, he managed to inspire me. So, probably we should start recognizing the role of young people in teaching, not only peer-to-peer teaching, but actually giving young people ownership of what they are teaching. Let's imagine students in a business school giving a class, a course, two students in an engineering school, and vice versa. And let's imagine, for example, students who start their own youth organization giving a class to students in another school or in a faculty. And I think we can go beyond this just by underlining the reason why this should be done. Young people are able to engage with other young people more easily. They are able to inspire them because they can lead by example. Basically, you know, when I was with this peer, I was inspired because he's like me and he's doing great things so he just made me think I can also do the same things. I'm not saying that more experienced people cannot inspire, but they have a main difference. They have experience. So young people will think, oh, I don't have that, maybe I cannot achieve what this person achieved. There's another concept and approach that I'm trying to promote. This is intergenerational innovation. So bringing together different generations to innovate and tackle issues. And more specifically, I'm proposing to bring together company employees or anyways, people who just retired and students who are about to graduate to play together, for example, innovation games, solve issues, actually, you know, this is a way to have fun because you are gaming, but it can be the beginning of something bigger, a project and a profit, a startup, a patent. Now the point is that this way we can address different issues, not only youth unemployment, but also the social marginalization issue of people who are retiring and we can focus on issues like sustainability, not only actually. And the link between these is networks. That means that when people are retiring, their network ties are fading away. So we are offering them a way to keep their network ties alive because basically there might be this young person who's got this great idea and he just needs connections, resources to be mobilized. So these people who just retired can get back to their own previous company and say, yeah, there is this young person who lets employ him or let's support his startup in many different ways. This can be possible. Thank you. Let me invite the audience to begin considering some questions. If you'd like to email it to us, I have an iPad here. See it if you email it to youth at weft.ch or on Weibo hashtag weft youth and the same hashtag for Twitter. By the way, it's hash pound weft youth, excuse me. But I see a common thread or hear a common thread amongst all of these panelists even though you're coming from slightly different places. Chris is talking about new and innovative ways of delivering education. Andrea is talking about using connecting young people to young people to learn from each other as well as the older generation and the younger generation but providing a platform to do that. Michelle talked about a platform to engage Malaysian youth in the creation of public policy. Jaime talked about a platform where interaction can take place in a corporation. And you're talking about the use of your organizations and your Federation of young people in the development of China. So where do we take this? How do we use, for example, Chris, these kinds of platforms in the redesign of education? That's a great question. We've been really focusing on this question of how education can be delivered and Jaime would be more expert than me on the implementation of this, but we've been looking at the concept of blended learning in a lot of detail. I think we know a couple of things now. One is that the purely traditional, if you like, sort of what we would call chalk-and-talk method of teaching with a teacher in a classroom is not only unnecessary anymore but it's a pretty ineffective way for people to learn. But we also know through, for example, completely online learning in the US that actually just learning sitting in front of a computer terminal, even though you might be networked and linked to a lot of very creative resources is also not really a way to fundamentally learn because one also needs the opportunity for social interaction and for deeper debate. So how can we put together the best of these different modes of learning? There are blueprints now emerging which can really sort of show how you can get the really higher-order skills of learning face-to-face in the classroom facilitated by peers as much as by teachers who will have a completely different role as mentors and coaches and not transmitters of knowledge. That can be done. If I could just take it up a level though and we're at the World Economic Forum I think we're allowed to think big perhaps think a little bit away from the normal sort of allowed territory. I think there are three things I'd like to say that pick up on what the panel have said and this is about sort of macro government policy as well as the micro stuff that we can do in the classroom. First of all, it is true that education remains one of the last sort of undisrupted areas of delivery and I personally believe it's no coincidence that education systems have not kept pace with the way that other industries have revolutionized how they work. I think governments are going to have to get very brave and really liberalize the supply side of education and allow it to be delivered in many different ways in much more creative ways not just by government organizations but by not-for-profits, by private organizations and whilst of course we're talking about vulnerable young people and therefore we need regulation we should also think about how to get as much liberalization as that delivery as we can. I think what we'll see then is education that becomes much more bite-sized I think we'll see much less of a division between education and the workplace we'll see the growth of apprenticeships as a perfectly natural way of people learning skills we spend a lot of time in school de-skilling people from the things that they're going to need once they enter the world of work why would we do it like that so I think that liberalization and finally just to really think about the macro policy you know we do have these pockets of skills deficits and pockets of youth unemployment it seems pretty obvious that governments are going to have to think long and hard about any remaining barriers to the movement of people from one place to another because if we're going to solve this as a world we need to think not about which slice of the pie do different countries actually have but actually if we can all break down trade barriers, break down the movement of people and goods from one place to another together we'll actually grow the world economy and therefore these issues will start to solve themselves. On the topic of one of the institutions that hasn't changed very much in the world the session yesterday on education the provost of Carnegie Mellon University said that higher education hasn't changed dramatically in a thousand years to which Gordon Brown the former prime minister of the United Kingdom responded in England they always say the first 500 years of any institution are the toughest so do we have questions from the audience? Does anybody have an idea? Yes sir we need to put on our headsets Japanese hold on Now I'm from International Rotary We at International Rotary tried to develop use and we have about 150,000 Rotary mainly high school students and we have Rotary clubs again we have hundreds of thousands of participants we have activities globally and we have system for foreign students international students we have exchange of students globally now my question is about international students any experience in terms of sending young people overseas for training or education outside their own countries? Did everybody get the question? For those who didn't have a headset on the question is what is our experience the gentleman is from Rotary International I believe he said and the question is what is everybody's experience with international exchanges of students and giving them a more global perspective I think when we talk about education or capacity building for new economy or for all the challenges that we are facing what we need to address more than before is experience learning and peer education as Andrea already mentioned experience learning and peer education can only be achieved through platforms like this through international exchanges programs and through youth initiated organizations and programs so I think any approaches that we can enhance more experience education peer education this is a way to build a kind of construct the old one and build a new one and we did a lot of in that area and from my federation and in China because China is one of the biggest demanding country for sending students to study overseas we are the biggest foreign students now even in the UK and in Europe in the USA I find this process going abroad to study going back to China or they stay abroad this is a very constructive process they contribute to the modernization process of China and they also contribute to the integration process of China's ideas and Chinese mindsight with the world so we have students exchange programs a very big one and with China Japan we have big scale youth exchange and students exchange and with Europe with the US I think from the government commitment there is a strong will and a big investment in that direction and there are a lot of grassroots organizations and international NGOs like Junior Achievements they are doing that and I find this a very constructive way and I think this should be invested by the governments should we have more investment from the business sector because the investment in education if it is only from government sometimes it is a little bit delayed from the market so we need more shareholders, thank you Thank you, Jaime this plays right to you, you raised your hand this whole connection between the business sector and the educational sector and youth development organizations so let me share what I was going to say before and then try to answer the gentleman's question with a probably different approach I think governments companies have a lot of opportunity to send people outside but it's limited it's limited to a certain percentage of our population but we believe that younger generations deserve 100% of opportunity the truth is let's not underestimate the power of younger generations let's not underestimate their drive their hunger to learn and today they are connected with the world we're moving in a world where billions of devices are connected to a world where trillions of devices are connected these younger generations are already living and connecting with peers with younger people all over the world they see the internet and their social peers as an extension of their brain they actually do not need to be in another part of the world in order to be connected video and collaboration tools are already connecting them and they're already crossing bridging cultural differences by interacting with others within the company Sean you said it is exactly the same companies to their moving people are leveraging people talent by using technology to connect but also then and this is something that is very important we're actually more and more providing tools within the companies you have face books within the company tools today offer the same experience within the companies so social networking actually happens and you will the platform that Michelle talked about in order to capture that innovation and Chris you said something that was critical you said we talk about training innovations I think we have to train management to better develop younger generations in an effort to take risk to drive innovation and let people collaborate in order to be successful and that's within the companies and honestly outside of the companies also Andrea you had a response to the question just a quick comment regarding international issues it is a very important human experience it happened to me it happened to most of us I guess but the social economic impact the way probably it's even something that people don't talk about we are building internationally we are building bridges through the programs and the network ties again that we create among people who come from different countries are kept alive when we are going back to our own corners of the world and we are connected on Facebook they are connected on media so probably because we are in China it might be worth mentioning that you know restricting certain access is internationally might hinder the social economy but of sending students abroad under the international network because indeed when we are going back to our own country we might develop projects together with our own classmates who were coming from a totally different continent and you know right now we are talking about global consumption, global production and Professor Schwab addressed the global shippers by talking about global citizenship we are global citizens we are global citizens we are global citizens we have a couple of questions that have been emailed in maybe we can put that screen back up for a second because it's not coming up on my iPad thank you one of them is that is many European countries have linked their education system with business needs yet they are still facing significant needs on employment and the experience would like to tackle that one I think I should probably have a batch go ahead Chris it's complex because there's supply and demand and they're a long long leading time from these economic cycles I think what many European countries have begun to discover is that for some of them, particularly those that have a particularly large youth unemployment they rather abandon their skill space and they have to be able to produce things and became very, very reliant on a financial services industry because we all know when to use shock over the last five years or so and on a service industry which it becomes really apparent as entirely reliant on other aspects of the economy firing on the cylinders in order to have money this means that you end up with the generation of young people who have knowledge and skills that isn't actually the degree of how the industries look around them but at the same time there's a lack of an ability to grow industries so we can come back as an answer to that to the point about entrepreneurialism which can allow young people not just to become somebody else's business but to think about how they sell them but as I was reminded yesterday as we were discussing this four out of five startup businesses around the world tend to fail we don't want to lead a whole generation of people thinking that they're going to be able to create businesses and that they will be immediately successful it's a long, hard road this leads back to the point about risk taking so I think if we can foster entrepreneurialism that will be one way to allow young people to grow their way out of the recession that many parts of the world are in and at the same time at the government level if we can think of ways to liberalise both education and supply then we may see the rebirth of skills-based industries and a rebalancing of economies in Europe and in the Middle East in particular where we need to do that but it's certainly true that simply blinking the businesses of today with the education systems of today is probably not enough great. Questions from the audience another question we have some on the internet but it would be great to get another one from the audience if you don't I think there's a question on the internet that was up there that I found kind of interesting it was the second one that had to do with can you when you're doing virtual hiring judge the soft skills and I would call those the 21st century skills things like teamwork and collaboration and global perspective can you really get that on a virtual platform and I think this notion I'd like to expand it beyond just hiring is Michelle you talked about a virtual platform for public policy input platform both physical as well as probably virtual for peer to peer learning as well as connecting the older generation with the younger how do we deal with that soft skill issue and just begin to understand young people given the pervasiveness of social media and those kinds of platforms Michelle I think that's a very good question I mean virtually it really is quite difficult to tell the quality of the kind of opinions and comments that are coming through even when hiring virtually I don't think personally I don't think you should actually hire 100% virtually because you need to see the person there things that you know you can't tell from just online interaction text based but if you can use things like skype and video conferencing I think you can know a bit more about the person's character and how the person interacts so in that respect I think virtual hiring can be possible but only you know through the right channels great do you use any kind of platforms virtual platforms in your federation across China we do use we do that for our training our internal training because we have so many branches in the province in the cities and in the counties so we do virtual training when we have we deliver that through virtual training and I want to add a little bit to the first question about the training because I think is very important one for for the whole society to realize that supply is one side so training education but demand is another side so from the finance experience we find that the government's role in generating jobs the content of employment is very crucial so you have to build an economic structure where the contents the numbers of employees are considered as a high priority in the economic agenda the international labour organization once had a study that in the past 10 years or 15 years the world economy is developing but the contents of employment is not developing so that leads to the problems that we see in many parts of the world so for generating jobs from the demand side is very crucial and generating a culture and environment conditions for young people to start businesses is also very important they can employ themselves they can be a business owner themselves so spiritually, entrepreneurship conditionally, capital experiences, networks, mentorship all these are needed to build a larger demand side very good a question from the audience yes we have it, will it be in English or thank you can we get a microphone to this here, thank you thank you for calling me nice woman well, I'm also from Rotary International and I don't know whether this is a good place to ask or not but first of all I would like to tell you a little bit about Rotary International because we have the largest youth program, we are very into youth and just on the last council on legislation we passed youth as the fifth avenue of service for Rotarians so Rotary is a conglomerate the membership of the Rotary are all from the business leaders or the community leaders so listening to you how as an organization such as Rotary International how our program or our project can enhance or collaborate with you in businesses to have a better world I think that's basically my question so that's a great question, I know from the perspective of my own organization we would love to collaborate with Rotary and in fact we're actually having those conversations but I think I put this out to the panelists I mean this is a way to engage business people essentially who are part of Rotary International in the engagement of young people and it's not just Rotary I know you asked about Rotary but it's organizations like Rotary and other business and civic organizations so who would like to take it, Michelle? I think Rotary International can start with an online platform again, back to online virtual world thing I was speaking to one of the global shapers yesterday in a session and he had this fantastic online micro donation system which enables collaboration between charities and businesses and using celebrities as a way to get youth to be involved in a certain cause so in that sense I mean Rotary International with what it does it can engage online with youth very simple, very easily but making sure that you get the right message across as well I think also there's much to be said for mentoring and role modeling for young people and it gets to Andrea to some extent not to say that all Rotary members are part of an older generation but they are older typically than the students they're mentoring and so there is a way to use these kinds of organizations to fulfill your desire to connect at least in part the older generation with the younger generation we're beginning to run up on time we have about 6 minutes left and so I'm going to ask each of you in 30 seconds or maybe 45 I'm saying 30 so you slipped to 45 what is your number one takeaway from the conversation that we've had this morning so I'll give you 5 seconds to formulate it in your head and then I'm going to call on Andrea 5 seconds well it was 3 I think probably there's something underlying what we are talking about which has not made fully explicit and it's the fact that actually young people can inspire other generations so we're not talking anymore about young people being the ones who execute tasks please do that you're the young kid do that no please you young kid inspire me give me your input because you are closer to fresh trends you can be actually the only source of certain inputs and the other dimension is risk failure is not any more a problem anyone can fail this is a way of learning that's it Chris I think what struck me is the importance of making connections and particularly making connections between young people and older generations there's two way learning that can come from that certainly I'd be delighted to have a discussion about how the schools and government systems we're working with could link more to the rotary and see if that's one way to improve that but as a more general point I think providing those connections there was a really interesting piece of work on creativity and the trend of how creative people are with age sort of is like a camel with two humps and apparently the least creative point in our lives tends to be around the mid 40s won't embarrass the panel by asking others where they sit there but I'm firmly in the seat beyond the second hump if we can have more connection at both ends of that hump and perhaps the people in the middle just need to facilitate that then maybe that'll change the way things work because at the moment we tend to focus a lot of the structures around the middle and maybe that's going wrong Michelle I think the power of peer influenced him the most I think the power of peer networks is really really crucial in engaging youth as well as making them aware of stuff so if we can empower one youth imagine the number of other people he can empower and I think that's something we should look at in a more deeper perspective Hi Mike So for me the message is number one there's tremendous opportunity for younger generations tremendous you know what you said it's our responsibility to create the platform for them to be successful both in the business environment and in the social environment the next topic that I believe is critical academia, government industry together working on set or defining the skill set that are needed and in this world of hyper connectivity how can we enable them to better collaborate with peers in this ambition that they have there's a lot of opportunity a lot of innovation and a lot of risk that they're going to take in order to make us more successful and if you give me 10 seconds just two very fast thought number one I was hired over telepresence I was hired virtually my boss lived in London and I was in New York and so far it seems so good so I can tell you it is a fact that technology can help us be more successful but let's never forget the human interaction in this world in which we're going into if you want to engage young people you have to engage the others so the seniors the business people and the government and you have to engage young people professionally because there are a lot of techniques and experiences knowledge is building to that process so we need to work with professionals and professional organizations or expertise in that area that's great and my take away is in an attempt to summarize the panel is I came away from this with more hope than I walked into it it's a tough world out there for young people these days but my take away is on this whole intergenerational and aspect of it it's the peer to peer I mean a peer can be a young person to an older person or it can be an older person to a younger person it's not so much how old you are it's what you can learn from each other that counts and the key to that is really providing retooled educational models platforms by which various generations and individuals can interact and those platforms can be virtual, they can be physical but it's human interaction back to Jaime's point and a question of how do we facilitate those human interactions across generations and among peers so with that I want to thank my panel it was a great and lively discussion I'd like to thank the audience for coming in early this morning after the cultural soiree last night when some of you I'm sure we're out a little bit later than you expected and I'd like to thank the WEF for the opportunity to run this panel so thank you very much and have a good rest of the day I've been asked to ask people to hurry getting out of the room because they actually in a half an hour they're having a television show in here and they've got to retool the set and other things so thank you very much