 Hi everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Andy McAfee. I'm a scientist at MIT, and I have the great pleasure to moderate this session on delivering the reskilling revolution. The Davos agenda of 2021 is in its first day, and what we've already learned is that the single most important topic, the topic that does on top of everyone's minds, and that is the most frequent subject of discussion so far in the Davos agenda, is exactly the importance, the urgency of reskilling. So we are exactly in the right place at the right time to talk about this. For the first half hour of this hour long session, we will livestream this conversation out across the world via all of our channels. And then for the second half hour, we will move into a smaller scale session involving forum members and partners. So if you are one of those members or partners, please stick around for the second half as well. The very first person to win the Nobel Prize in Economics was a Dutch economist named Jan Tinbergen, and I think he got the situation exactly right. He said inequality is a race between technology and education. Technology can tend to increase inequality. It leads to more winner-take-all dynamics. It shuffles the required skills around. There are some challenges associated with greater inequality. The best way to deal with those challenges and to bring us back together and have a more equal society is by providing those skills, by lifting people up and providing education. The opportunity here is to rethink the way we're providing those skills, and in particular in a lot of cases, to use the technology itself to be part of the reskilling revolution. Those are some of the topics that we're going to cover today. As always with the forum, we have an all-star group of people to help us with this. I'd like to introduce our fourth panelist for the first half hour in alphabetical order. They are Majid Jafar, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Crescent Petroleum, Lady Mahian Jam, who is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of I Am the Code, Ashish Advani, who is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Junior Achievement Worldwide, and Ryan Roslansky, who was the Chief Executive Officer of LinkedIn. Before I turn it over to the panel, I'd like to invite my forum colleague, Sadia Zahidi, to give us an update on the reskilling revolution platform, which is one of the signature forum initiatives and is one-year-old as of right about now. Sadia? Great. Thank you very much, Andy. One year ago at the annual meeting in Davos when we were physically gathered, we launched the reskilling revolution initiative, and the aim was to reach one billion people with better education, better skills, and better jobs by 2030. Now, over this last year, we could not have seen this pandemic coming, and yet as we look out into 2021, this agenda is more urgent than ever before, and the platform can support a lot of the work towards it. So one big announcement of today is in collaboration with PWC, we did some research to understand what upskilling could lead to in terms of returns, and upskilling investments could lead to more than six trillion dollars being added to the global economy by 2030. So the dollar value number there is incredibly important, but of course the social repercussions are even more so. The second major update is that over this last year, despite the pandemic, the initiatives on the reskilling revolution platform have been able to reach 50 million people with better skills, particularly focused on those that are at-risk workers or displaced workers, and helping redeploy them into new jobs and new roles. That's work in 10 economies and 10 industries, and we're expecting six new countries to join the initiative this year. The third aspect is we all know that the language or the taxonomy around skills is somewhat dispersed. There's different language being used by employers, different language being used by educational institutions, different language being used by individuals when they describe their skills, and so what we've tried to do is with a number of the online learning platforms, with a community of chief learning officers, and with a community of chief HR officers, we've created a new taxonomy that is also being released today, and that can be used by everybody so that we all start speaking the same language, and finally there are a number of coalitions that are part of this initiative, and you'll hear more from LinkedIn, from I am the Code, from JA Worldwide, from UNICEF, from ILO across the course of the Davos agenda week on all of the fantastic work that is being done, but there's much more to still be solved, and I hope we'll hear more about that today. Thank you, Andy, back to you. We absolutely will hear more about that today. I'm going to turn it over to our panelists now. I have some questions for each of them, and I need to ask forgiveness in advance. We have a very tight agenda. We're short on time, so if I have to intervene and ask people to summarize and wrap up, please forgive me in advance. Ryan, we'd like to start with you. LinkedIn has this amazing, I think of it as kind of a cockpit or a dashboard for how jobs are changing around the world, what's in demand, what skills in particular are employers looking for? Can you start off by giving us a look at that cockpit and telling us what are some of the most important trends that you and LinkedIn are seeing in the world of skills and jobs? Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again for having me. I think this is such an important initiative, and like you said, we see in the LinkedIn data, we call it the economic graph. On LinkedIn, maybe you have a LinkedIn profile, there's about 700 million people in the world that have a LinkedIn profile, 55 million companies that have a LinkedIn profile that are at any given time posting up to 14 million jobs, and the connection of all those assets create what we call the economic graph, which gives us, to your point, a real-time dashboard into some of the things that are happening across the global economy. To your point, two trends that are worth calling out that we're seeing right now in the data. First and foremost, COVID has compressed years of digital transformation in the last couple of months, so it's no surprise that we're seeing a huge move into digitization. We project that nearly 150 million new tech jobs will be created over the next five years across software development, IT, product management, AI, et cetera, and many other jobs are just going to quite simply become more tech-enabled. They're going to require digital skills to do the work that you would have done, maybe offline in the past. Secondly, we're actually seeing a good increase demand for pandemic-driven roles, as you'd expect as well, especially around healthcare and education. The good news that we're seeing across all this is just the idea that transitioning into new roles is possible because skills are the currency. Over 75% of people, for example, who are moving into these data and AI and product management roles right now are coming from different job functions to begin with. Jobs are just a combination of skills at the end of the day, skills of the currency. For example, a food server has 71% of the skills that you would need to transition into something like a customer service role, but right now customer service roles are so in high demand on LinkedIn, but that need and ability for someone to move from food service is pretty simple to move into customer service. Similarly, someone like a bartender has about 47% of the skills you need to move into a sales role. It's really important to understand this transition of it's not just about the jobs, it's about the skills required for the jobs, skills of the currency. Now it's easier than ever to acquire those skills to demonstrate the proficiency, where in the past a lot of emphasis was really driven by education or pedigree alone. I think that's really good right now because we need to ensure they're creating economic opportunity for everyone and that ability to acquire skills, I think it's easier now more than ever. As long as to say this point, we have a good taxonomy and we're all talking about the same skills and we make that access equitable for everyone across the globe. Brian, let me ask you a quick follow-up. I find it fascinating like you say that the skills overlap between apparently distant jobs can actually be quite large. Do you have any insight yet in how you go about telling that bartender, for example, that they have 75% of what they need to transition into a sales job? Can you communicate to people what their skills actually are and what the easy transitions are? Absolutely, and I think that's the key to a lot of what's going to happen, make this happen, moving forward. Again, it starts with a status point. We need to make sure that we're all talking about skills in the same way. I think that's a critical foundation for all this because once we do that, we can be connecting education and employers and employees together. From that point, anytime someone is looking for a new job, we do it on LinkedIn platform. You have your LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn profile shows the skills that you have. We have all the jobs that are available in the world as well and the skills that those require. Our ability to go into a world where we're using those skills as the asset, the skills of the currency, to easily tell you that, hey, by acquiring these three skills, you have access to opportunity of these five jobs. You can make more money in these certain ways or it's moving this way. That's a lot of what we're doing. We recently launched a tool on LinkedIn, which is called the Career Network Explorer. You can find it at opportunity.linkedin.com, but it's really setting the stage to do exactly what you just said. Time for one more quick follow-up with you. You mentioned that there are, I'm sorry, 700 million people that have a LinkedIn profile right now. That's correct. 722 million, actually. Great. You would like to get that to a billion. We on this session would all like to get that to a billion or even higher. What's it going to take to get many more people onto these job and skill platforms? I think that the more people get access to technology in general is very helpful. A lot of the growth right now that we're seeing across LinkedIn is happening outside the United States. We're seeing strong growth across Asia. We're starting to see growth across Africa. These network-based products grow based on network effects, so the larger the network gets, the more people invite other people to join it. I think it's just a matter of time before we see that billion number across LinkedIn. Again, the most important part of this is that it's not about the number. It's about once you get people on these platforms, once you get people to demonstrate the skills that they have to connect them to opportunity, there's so much good and value that comes out of this data and this graph that we can do to connect talent opportunity to get the skills that they need moving forward in the world. I'm sorry, I just made the classic Zoom error of trying to talk while I was on mute. Ryan, thank you very much. Lady Maryam, let me turn to you. I am the code is such a fascinating organization because you're trying to deliver, you don't call it STEM skills anymore. I just saw you call it steamed skills. We want to understand what those are, but we want to understand most fundamentally how you have found success in giving those skills to more marginalized, more underrepresented communities around the world. Well, thank you, Andrew. I'm so excited to be here. I remember last year at the same time we were at, you know, when Sadia kindly invited us to join the risk killing platform. I was in a Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya with over 3,000 girls launching the risk killing platform. So today I can report that, you know, all of our girls are part of the platform, but at the same time they are learning how to code. And what the reason why we chose the, you know, steamed as a, you know, as a topic, it's science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics and design. We cannot design platform like the risk killing platform without including marginalized girls. When I say marginalized girls, I'm talking about young girls that the world has forgotten like myself when I was growing up as a child. I didn't have any education today. I'm sitting here talking to you because somebody have given me the skills I needed as a young woman. And that's why it's very important platform like the risk killing platform. As Sadia said, it's not just a language, but we make sure that we include people. And I think for me what is really exciting today and at Davos is that we are including people and this platform is all about that. And for us at IMDocode, we are the first ever African organization to mobilize government, private sector, and businesses to advance them education. But we need, we must not forget the young girls and the boys growing up across the world. Throughout the COVID-19, we have seen that girls don't have infrastructure, they don't have connectivity, they don't have devices. So we can't really risk kill people if we don't give them, you know, the tools they need to risk kill themselves. You know, LinkedIn platform, they're very good platforms, all of that. But there are some young girls right now sitting down as you and I are speaking that don't have access to any skills. And for me, you know, we've been talking about skills, data as the new oil, I think skills are the new oil. If you don't have skills, you can't have job. If you don't have job, you don't have dignity. If you don't have dignity, you know, you have mental health issues and so many things happening across the world because people just don't have the skills they need. So risk killing them, giving them different opportunities is absolutely. What are the main things that you've learned in your organization's history about how to take those young people who are your targets, make them aware of this opportunity, and then keep them interested throughout a curriculum. Steam skills are critically important. They're not trivially easy to acquire. Learning to code takes a lot of effort and diligence. What have you learned about how you keep these people engaged, how you keep them on track? That's a very good question. I think, first of all, organization like us, we never had a seat at the table. You know, we've been, there's so many organizations across the world who are doing amazing job. If you want to reach the one billion people, we need to include people. And I think the reason why I'm so excited and so honored to be part of this platform, and because my voice is being heard, and when my voice is being heard, the voice of young marginalized girls will be heard. That's number one. And number two, we all of us have skills across the world. We know what to do. We know what works and what doesn't work. I think what we don't do sometime, we don't include people into the conversation. We don't include experts. And when we look into science, technology, engineering, mathematics, art, and design, many people we're talking about, well, poor people can't learn about coding. Poor people can't do this. Why, let's feed them first before you talk about coding. And then I demonstrated within a year that I can teach young girls from Uganda sitting down in Kampala or sitting down in Afghanistan who can actually do data entry in a very simple way, or young girls sitting in Kakuma refugee camp as a refugee where she comes from a fractured society. Not only she's deprived from her human right, but also she's sitting in a way that she has no dreams. Within one year, I teach one girls how to do Java, Python, and Ruby. I didn't go to school. I'm the typical example of a young girl who didn't have any education. And today I've learned seven coding languages in my local library in Guildford. So the model works. We know what works. But what we need to do, I think, and I think that's why I'm urging every single person to buy this platform. Because in 2030, my young girls who are now 11 years old, they'll be 21 years old. Those are the girls who will be going on LinkedIn to try to find jobs. But if we don't invest right now, it's not going to work. I think we need to start investing in young girls and boys today. And then we will see the result in 2030. We're all going to celebrate, because it's so important right now. If I'm here today, it's because someone gave me an opportunity. And then I'm going to use all my power and all my influence, all the opportunity I have working with the risk killing platform and being a young global leader at the World Economic Forum to make sure everyone knows about this platform so we can risk kill boys and girls so they can get a job in 2030. What's the minimum technology set that your target population needs? Is it just a smartphone and some internet connectivity? Literacy, numeracy. So we just launched a campaign called Read, Write and Code. When you know how to read, how to write, I learned my alphabet when I was 16 years old. By the time I was 20 years old, I was already learning four coding languages in my local library. Safety is also important. Cybersecurity right now is very key for these young girls who are being abused online. That's also important, but it's very basic. Just know how to read, how to write, and once you know how to read, how to write, it's easy for you to know how to code. That's why we launched this campaign for everyone to know how to read, how to write, how to code, literacy, numeracy, and then you start learning how to code. And like I said, I really want people to know that skills are the new oil. If you don't have skills, no matter who you are in this world, you will never have a job and then it's going to be difficult for you to be part of the market, the global workforce. And that's why we need to back the risk-killing platform because it's an important initiative at the World Economic Forum. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Ashish, let's turn to you. We actually haven't talked very much yet about the pandemic, which is kind of an important phenomenon for all kinds of reasons around the world. One of them is that it has increased the urgency of this reskilling task that we're talking about. You're kind of like LinkedIn, junior achievement around the world has this wonderful, again, a cockpit or a dashboard to watch people trying to launch something, trying to acquire skills, trying to make some change happen out there in the world. Can you characterize the changes that the pandemic has brought and how you're responding to them? Sure. And I want to just start by saying, wouldn't it be wonderful to have more people like Miriam in the world? And if we just thought of this reskilling initiative as a way to give more young girls, young women, and young boys the chance to have the mindset that Miriam has to actually acquire these skills, the challenge is how do you do this in a pandemic? How do you do this when over one billion young people are out of school? And I think what I've observed the JA network doing is just remarkable because I think that the need to pivot and be able to deliver content and programs in a digital way through remote learning has really forced creativity and innovation in our global network. For example, we launched a partnership, frankly, thanks to this reskilling platform with Microsoft to take their digital skills platform, Microsoft Learn, which I understand Ryan was built with the LinkedIn economic graph to actually identify what the skills are that young people do need. We took that platform and we're distributing it now during the pandemic in four different continents, integrating it into JA programs. That's an example of something that probably would have been harder to do outside of a pandemic-like environment because a Microsoft Learn platform is done through remote learning. And I think one of the important benefits of what WEF has done is by bringing stakeholders together rather than have everyone build something new from scratch, what this platform does is it allows people to identify what their assets are, in our case distribution to young people and partner with people who've got great technology or great learning tools and really find a way to help reach this very ambitious goal of one billion young people by 2030. It's going to take two collaboration and cooperation to make that happen. I'll give you two more examples really briefly in my time. One is the importance of mindset shift. So it's not just about skills. It's also about role models. So to have a young person like Miriam be able to have that confidence to say, yes, I want to learn these skills, requires some connectivity to a role model who's done it before. Those role models can't be people who are say like Jeff Bezos, who, you know, if you're a young girl in Africa, you don't necessarily, in fact, seeing Jeff Bezos might discourage you from actually, you know, going through entrepreneurship program or building these skills. So we have a program in the MENA region, Middle East, North Africa called 100 Future Jobs, which connects young people in the Middle East to role models who are just like them so they can see why they would want to acquire these skills. And the third initiative I want to tell you about is entrepreneurial skills pass, which is a way for young people who've gone through a program in entrepreneurship to actually have a credential to show to employers that they've developed these soft skills that employers so value. So I want to highlight these three because I think skills and mindset and micro credentials all have to come together to be able to deliver these very ambitious goals that Wef has set. Ashish, I love that phrase that you use, you are a distribution channel to young people around the world. Operate that channel in reverse for us just a little bit. And can you channel and summarize what the young people of the world want to say to kind of, you know, the older generation, the incumbents of the world? What messages do you want to deliver to us? Well, I will start by saying that young people are not a monolithic group. So there are so many subgroups even within what we call young people. We have done a survey though. We did in partnership with EY, which reached over 6,000 young people in over 50 countries around the world. And there are very common trends in what we're learning. One is a sense of optimism for a 10 year horizon, but less optimism over the next few years, next say three to five years is less optimism. So I would say one important sort of characteristic of this optimism is if you look at it within the lens of youth disillusionment, being one of the top 10 global risks that Wef has identified in the global risk report, which I think just came out this week, you see that young people who've gone through a program that impacts their mindset look positively on the world. But one of the more real risks we have today is that young people who haven't had these experiences, who don't have that sense of possibility actually can get very disillusioned. And it's now one of the top 10 global risks. So I think it's quite material. Fantastic. Let me turn to Majid. Majid, you are large employer on the panel. You are eager to find people with the skills that you need. And you operate, I think, in parts of the world that are far from the epicenter of the technology revolution. Can you start by giving us an overview of the skills that you're looking for, how they've shifted, especially in light of this technology revolution and because of the pandemic and whether or not you're finding the skills that you need in the markets where you do business? Thanks. So it's great to be here and congratulations to the forum on the reskilling revolution initiative, which is critical and I hope we all can get behind it. So where we're headquartered in the Middle East and North Africa, the youth unemployment challenge or rate is double the global average. So the global average is about 14%, which is three times the rate for adults in general. But in our region, unfortunately, it's about 30% and getting worse. So we've had revolutions, wars, refugee crises, and then on top of that, of course, the COVID pandemic. So it's really quite a big challenge. And unlike Western countries or developed countries, we don't have the social safety net. So there isn't the support. We also have an education system that's failing to prepare young people for the new world of work. Now that reform takes a lot of time. And of course, we have the basic demand challenge of insufficient investment and growth and we can't look beyond that. And we've heard that in earlier sessions today. Let's not lose sight of growth. But in terms of skilling, we have a strange situation in our region where the more qualified you are, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be unemployed, which is hard to understand, except that the education system is not meeting the requirements of the job market. And at the same time, graduates have an expectation of what their first job is going to be. And the labor market may not be able to support that. So when it comes to technology, we have the threat. I mean, obviously, we're all meeting on Zoom. And if we continue meeting like this, then we don't need to travel. And a lot of young people are involved in the service sector that support travel as one example. But turning to the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution, I just wanted to refer to two examples where we've been involved. One is a partnership that we've done with Idraq, which is the massive online open courses platform of the Queen Rania Foundation with the British Council to upscale half a million people across the Middle East, North Africa, in three core workplace readiness skills, which is English language skills, IT skills, basic IT skills for the workplace, and workplace skills of the more social type. So we launched it a few months ago, just when the pandemic got going and we were in lockdown. We've already passed 270,000, I'm pleased to say. So I think the countries all across our region. So I think the potential of that is far more. And then a second one is an investment that we've made through our corporate VC arm, CE Ventures. We've invested in Edcast, which is a Silicon Valley-based company that's leading the way in upskilling using AI. And the forum is actually recognized as a tech pioneer. So in India, they've already rolled out nationwide re-skilling and partnership with the IT ministry, which is a great model. And we're now committed to supporting their expansion across the MENA region as well. I want to go back to that truly striking thing that you said, that in the MENA region, in general, the more educated a young person is, the less likely they are to be employed. That is not what we want to see happening. We spent a great deal of time at the forum discussing productive public-private partnerships. You just described a very important partnership between the formal educational system in the region and the employers in the system in that region. That doesn't appear to be working that well. What can we do to make that incredibly important partnership work better? So clearly education reform is needed because our education system, by and large, is set up to train young people to join the public sector. And those public sector jobs aren't available anymore. And even the ones that are require new skills that the basic education system isn't providing. Now, that reform is, of course, a generational challenge. It'll take a long time. I think we need to focus how can we bridge the gap because we can't just give up on the current generation that we have across our region. And one thing is using technology platforms like some of the examples we've talked about in this session. And another is, can we look at more of the apprenticeship-type programs that you have in successful countries like Germany and Switzerland? And now starting in more places like the UK as well, where they also realize they've gone too far in the university-only direction to actually try and meet the needs of the current job market. So it's not easy, but I think using technology and with more participation of the private sector, we can make a real impact. Masjid, thanks. That's extremely helpful. And I would like to thank all of our panelists for their remarks. I learned a lot from them. I'm sure our global audience did as well.