 Hello and welcome to this world economic forum session on skilling the global workforce. It would have been fantastic for all of us to be physically in Davos at the World Economic Forum. But this is the way it is in a pandemic stricken world which has changed not just how we also changed the skills required to bring the session alive and that extends to every part of life. What have the past 12 months taught us about where the global workforce is at this moment and where it needs to be to be ready for a post-pandemic world. That's what we hope to navigate over the next 45 minutes during this web session and we have a very high powered panel with different perspectives joining us from across the globe. Allow me to welcome first and foremost Guy Ryder, Director General of the International Labor Organization with us from Geneva. With us is Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Grass and Steel, one of the bright stars of the Narendra Modi government in India. With us is Josephine Teo, Minister for Manpower and the second Minister for Home Affairs in Singapore. A lot of work being done in Singapore when it comes to skilling their labor force. We'll see what lessons she has for the rest of the world. With us also is Ilian Dehiz, Chief Executive Officer of one of the world's leading HR Consultancies, the Ideco Group and last but not least, the pride of the Indian IT sector, Saleel Parikh, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the IT Behemoth Infosys. So welcome and thank you so much for taking our time to join us in this session. I want to start by asking Mr. Guy Ryder for his opening comments on where you think the workforce needs to be going forward, the trends that you've picked up over the past 12 months because the pandemic, which of those trends do you see now having forever altered what it will mean to be a successful member of the global workforce. Mr. Ryder. Thank you very much indeed, Raul. Well, let me say that the photograph of global labor markets during 2020 is a very ugly photograph. We've estimated that global working hours have gone down by 8.8%. The equivalent of 225 million full-time jobs lost around the globe. This is a bad place to be in. As we're scanning the horizon for the future, being in this deep hole doesn't help us. One thing I want to draw attention to, particularly in the context of this debate about skills, is that a large part of this loss in employment and work is due to people withdrawing from the labor force. We think that 81 million people have become inactive in the global labor force over the last year. How are we going to recuperate them? How are we going to reach them in terms of the skills acquisition that they probably more than anybody badly need? Second point to make, Raul, is there has been a massive interruption of education and training in the course of the year, and this of course doesn't help us. We have seen a remarkable migration to some extent to online and online and distance learning techniques, but this is very unevenly spread. We know that access to the connectivity and the opportunities are very uneven. Very worryingly, we've seen school kids simply dropping out from distance learning processes. Then looking forward, what is this new normal, which is talked about so much, going to look in that hopefully not too distant post-pandemic environment? I think we need to be cautious because we need to make a distinction between what we are doing today and having to do, if you like, under the duress of living with COVID-19 and what we can choose to do once we have hopefully vanquished through vaccines and all the rest of the pandemic. I want to make the point that we have choices about where we go and those choices will fundamentally affect the skinning requirements of the future. If we look at the skills required for the green economy, well, that depends on policy choices that will be made, for example, in Glasgow later this year. If you look at the care economy and the skills there, all of these things come out in the WEF report. It's going to depend on policy choices, so there's a lot in our hands. My last point, Raoul, and I think this probably will concentrate our minds in this conversation, of course, we have seen an acceleration of the pre-existing trends towards digitalisation of work in various aspects. I think the question is, is this simply an acceleration of the path we were already on, or is it taking us to a different place? I'm not sure I know the answer to that question, but I also think that if we are imagining a world where digitally intermediated ways of working in the future are going to be more predominant, then we have a really wide bundle of issues to address. Skills, of course, but issues of regulation, issues of employment contract, it's a whole agenda for action, and we have to address the whole of it. I'll leave it there. Thank you. You've touched upon multiple layers, and hopefully we'll build on these as we go along in this conversation. But Minister, in Singapore, your country has always been known for being at the very cutting edge of innovations when it comes to skilling. What are the major changes that you've been grappling with over the past 12 months, and how have you been re-gearing your workforce to deal with the challenges of skilling in the post-pandemic world? Well, thank you very much for the opportunity to participate in this very important conversation. I think in the first place, we always consider that the future of work is evolving at any time, and so our efforts are really a journey without end. From a long time ago, we started with building up good schools and teachers to make sure that young people enter the workforce well prepared. From about two decades ago, we decided it was just as important to build up a robust system of continuing education and training. It is our key strategy to enable our people to keep progressing in life through better skills and access to good jobs. And in 2015, we started a nationwide skills future movement to try and cultivate a stronger personal ownership over lifelong learning. Now, as it turns out, and the last 12 months continue to bring this point out very clearly, employers have a very big part to play in this. People are much more motivated to put in the time and effort to learn new things when they can see them impact their jobs. It can be to make their work easier, less tedious, or more meaningful and enjoyable. Now, this does not happen unless the employers are effecting change at the workplace, whether it is the production line or bringing about new processes or new operating models. So I think the key is learning how to involve employers a lot more and encourage them to think about what it takes to succeed in the future. And a good example is our financial services sector. In 2019, we had the Institute of Banking and Finance systematically mapped all the job roles in our sector and asked the employers what would be different in three to five years because of the emergence of AI, automation, and the adoption of data analytics. And so in every job, we identified the new skills that were needed and shared this very broadly, including the C-Streets. And as a result of this, thousands of people got help to reskill. In many local banks, we had former bank tellers picking up new skills such as digital marketing, something quite unthinkable. And now they are taking on new roles in customer service, in bank operations. And so even as some jobs disappear, there are always methods to help the workers stay, to contribute, and to help the businesses succeed in different ways. And it's really not just about the existing employees, when the skills requirements are evolving so fast as it does in saline sector, for example, employers are always looking to chop up from outside. And rather than poach from one another, we are trying to support the employers to expand the talent pool by training people from other jobs, from other industries with transferable skills. And so that it is a win-win for both the employer as well as employees. So the big story really is that workforce transformation goes hand in hand with business transformation. Get business transformation going in every sector of the economy, get employers to improve quality of every job and support them to upskill every single one of our workers. And that also relates very much to what Guy was talking about earlier. These are our policies, they're partly driven by our policy choices. And the policy choices must drive the business transformation. And through that, the workforce transformation. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Yo for your opening comments. It's interesting that we have a country like Singapore and a country like India represented on the same panel here at the World Economic Forum because Minister Pradhan, the reality is the challenges of skilling are so very different, wherein in Singapore we're seeing the government lay more and more emphasis on automation, robotics, artificial intelligence machine, learning to try and up the skills of their workforce in India at a very basic level. The challenge of your government is to equip the Indian population, 1.3 billion people, with the basic skills to be able to productively enter the workforce because we're producing more people who are entering the workforce everywhere than anywhere else in the world. So how are you dealing with the challenge of skilling and then upskilling and re-skilling in the context of what the pandemic has shown? Thank you, Rahul. In India, if I divide the scenario in the two parts, pre-pandemic phase and pandemic and post-pandemic phase, every year in India 960 million people are coming in the bracket of working age group, 15 to 459. Out of that around 420 million people are real-time workforce. Every year, 25 million new people are joining the workforce. This is the broader canvas of Indian workforce scenario. Our challenge is in an aspirational society, how to blame the aspiration, education, knowledge, and employability and skill. With the recent reform on education policy, which is known as new education policy 2020, we are very much giving focus for the re-skilling, upskilling, and this pandemic has given us enormous opportunity to re-look certain pending things. If I cite one example, digitalization with the good penetration of internet, good articulation of IoT, big analytics, big data processing, all these things has facilitated new job opportunity, new skilling opportunity to our new workforce, to our existing workforce. If I cite two, three examples of the recent pandemic time, the digital network, digital financial transaction has increased multi-fold. They all need skilled manpower. They all need skilled manpower. We use this opportunity on policy platform, on implementation platform, how to cope up with the expectation of the global changing scenario. And we are preparing, we are very confident and very focused in one area. We have to convert this aspirational community, aspirational society towards more employability and skilling, upskilling, re-skilling is the need of the time. And Government of India is very much focused on that. Thank you, Minister Pradhan. Mr. Salil Parik, you are at the other end of the skilling challenge as far as emphasis is concerned. And skilling is forever a constant part of what a company like Infosys tries to do with its employees year after year. How has the pandemic impacted or disrupted your skilling plans? And what are you doing differently now going into the future than you were before COVID struck? So, thanks Rahul and thank you to the World Economic Forum for having me and Infosys here. What we are trying to do with the skilling activity is making sure that it's available in the first step for all of our employees. Second step, we've expanded it to a lot of our clients. And now we've put in place an infrastructure essentially for all students, primarily engineering and science students, but really all students in India. So what are we doing? We've made skilling available for our employees through a platform that we call Lex inside Infosys. And it's available to all the employees. They have about 1200 different courses on it. This is essentially technology skilling. And that's the narrow focus we're working on. We've also now started to use this with about 30 of our clients who are building on this platform. So there's 200,000 employees of Infosys, about 300,000 employees within the client base. And now we've made a version of this available to all students in India on a free basis. And about a million students have already started to access it and started to use it. So our idea is we must go ahead with reskilling because the change in technology, the digital transformation that was referred to by Minister Pradhan, by Minister Josephine Thio, that is the key that enterprises or companies can do. And with the reskilled people that can support all of the new digital world. That's the main focus that we have going ahead as well. Thank you, Mr. Parik. Mr. Ilyan, your sense of the trends that you're picking up globally, as one of the world's largest recruiters, what is it that you're picking up about, how the nature of jobs, job requirements, expectations of employers are changing, and your thoughts on how the workforce should be gearing up to meet these new expectations? Thank you, Raul, and also thank you for having me here today. Yes, we are active in more than 56 countries in the world, putting every day at work around 2 million workers, around 100,000 companies. And what we see indeed is that upskilling and reskilling is from crucial importance. But what is from crucial importance is that individuals, employers, and governments are doing a so-called tripartite engagement, a tripartite engagement with specific call to actions, or like Guy Reider was saying, with specific choices. And it starts with the individuals. I think everybody in the world should be aware that it is either her own responsibility to stay attractive on the labor market, especially because when we look at the technology acceleration, on average people are losing 40% of their skills every three years. So it means after 10 years, they are obsolete on the labor market. And that's why when we speak about lifelong learning, it's not because it is a new kind of sexy name. No, it is a reality that individuals are facing. They have to study, they have to learn on a lifelong basis. And that's the call to actions on the individuals. On the employers, what we see and what we say is that we should not protect jobs, but we employers should invest in employability. They should make sure that they have, like the country Singapore, that they have a clear vision, that they have a clear strategy regarding their workforce, and especially a planning on the skills they would need in three years, in five years from now, with a clear plan. Because if they don't upskill and re-skill their workforce, they will lose their competitiveness. They will lose their attractiveness. And by the way, financials are also speaking for upskilling and re-skilling. ABB has done studies. If you re-skill one or if they re-skill one of the employees, it will cost them 35,000 US dollars. If they lay off somebody, giving the burden of this layoff to the society, and at the same time, a new person with the right skills and capabilities, it will cost them 100,000 US dollars. So also financially, there is a case there for employers to upskill and re-skillings, much less disruptive socially, and it is financially attractive. And then we come to the third stakeholders, very important stakeholders, governments. And governments have to put framework and incentives in place. And there are already many initiatives and best practices in the world. Again, I would like to quote the individual training account in Singapore or in France, or the training voucher in Brazil. But there are some other ideas that could be put in place. Differentiated tax treatment for layoff versus upskilling. Today, there is no real tax treatment differentiation. Accounting treatment of the training and the re-skilling and really take upskilling, re-skilling as an investment and not as a cost. And last but not least, a new idea. We see many countries, many governments putting hundreds of billions supporting the local economy. But from my perspective and all perspective, this huge amount of money are quite short termists. There is no strategy behind this short term support. Why shouldn't we use this money putting in the economy to re-skill and upskill people and link the money, this amount of money, to the efforts of companies and individuals to re-skill themselves and be prepared for the so-called new normal post-COVID. Back to you, Raul. Very interesting thoughts there, especially about differentiated tax norms for those who lay off employees and those who actually make the effort of re-skilling employees. What we also want to tell everyone who's watching on top link and on the World Economic Forum website is that we're encouraging you to join in this conversation. We'll try and make it as interactive. We'll try and empower you and bring you into this live Davos agenda conversation as well. So what I'll do is I'll take the first question, which is along the lines of what I was about to ask. But since this is coming from Enrico Nano, who's a global shaper from Rome in Italy, from our Global Shaper Hub, he asks a very important question about who does the responsibility for re-skilling lie on? Does it lie on the individual employee? Does it lie on the company that he works for, the concern where he's engaged, or the government? And this is very important. So is it just about individual survivals? You need to do what you need to do to survive and ensure that you're relevant. Or the government comes into what extent does the government have the capacity, the bandwidth and the resources to be able to enable this re-skilling? So I want to put that question first and foremost to Guy Ryder about who you think, who does the ILO think should take the responsibility for facilitating this re-skilling process? Well, I think the conversation has brought out the answer to the question already, Rahul. It's not the exclusive responsibility of any one party. I've heard the Minister from Singapore talk about the role of business. I've heard voices from business talking about the role of government. It's quite interesting. And I've heard Alan talk about the role of the individual. Now, if we accept, and I absolutely do, that this re-skilling, upskilling business has to be within the context of lifelong learning, there is no final destination in this process, then I think what we have to do is set about in a way that we are only in the foothills of doing, of working out what effective lifelong learning delivery systems look like, crucially how they're to be financed, there's going to be a big investment required in this and we all know what public finances are likely to look like post pandemic. And then we have to really work out what the distinctive responsibilities of the state, of private enterprise and the individual are. And these have to be complementary. They don't have to be the same in every country, but we have to work this out. I'm really interested by what was said about the interest that companies may have, not in laying off a worker, but in re-skilling him or her, that of course presupposes a lasting, a durable relationship between the employer and the employee over a longer period of time than sometimes business decisions are taken in. So I take also very seriously Alan's point about taking our current circumstances, a longer term strategic approach to recovery processes and the role of skill formation and acquisition within it. And this is where I want to ask Salil Parik about the kind of role a company like Infosys can be expected to play in the mission that Minister Pradhan and his government are engaged in because you build your own upskilling platform called Lex. And you have the capacity to be able to deliver at scale using technology in a way that the government simply doesn't have the capacity and the prowess to be able to do so. So how seriously are you thinking about offering your platforms, your expertise to the government, how many people can use this expertise? And how closely are you collaborating with the government at the center and in the states and possibly even at the municipal level to ensure that the generic pool for upskilling which is available, the techniques and technologies that are available are made available to as many people as possible, Mr. Parik. Thanks Rahul. I think our objective is to make this platform available as much as it needs to be used by any of the governments at the center or in the states or as you said even at the municipal level. The thinking that we had was first by allowing it to become open for students. All students in India now have access to it and they can use it for any of the technology skills. But in addition to the technology skills, the platform can also take other skills, whatever skills are relevant for that set of people and individuals and package them and make them available on the platform. So the more and more this mobile technology is available around India and around the world, the more this sort of skilling platform is feasible to be used. So my view is we already have some discussions going on but we are open to expanding them to the extent that is needed. This platform is truly something we think can be used by almost anyone. Minister Pradhan, one of your government's marquee projects is called Skill India. The title speaks for itself. How successful in your estimate has this program been, not just in creating basic skills but also in helping upskill the workforce that they're more relevant for the job requirements of companies like Infosys and other such companies going forward. Are you concerned if things stay the way that they are at this moment, we could end up in a situation where there are millions of people entering the workforce but who simply don't have the skills required like education is not keeping up with the technology requirements for companies to be able to employ you successfully. Minister Pradhan. Raul, I'll answer the Veshik question raised by some audience and I'll answer your question also. Veshik question is whose responsibility is re-skilling and off-skilling? Individual or government or industry? My categorical answer is everybody's. Company and industry should spend money, spend money on technology, spend money on spreading. Governments should facilitate and individuals should also pay something otherwise any free training or skilling is a waste according to my experience of the skill ministry. This is part one. Part two is how successful is skill India and how successful is this skill India movement? It's a it's a it's a notional or it's a real time. My categorical answer Raul is is very real time. All the government of India since last few years has mobilized and created a public momentum to create more skill and off-skill momentum like Salil has mentioned. This is all due to a collective poose by industry and government body. You will understand with one example. Now one driverless car company working at California, the server, the planning and the intellectual support is given from some very urban area of eastern part of India from the Chovish Pragana and city like Bhubnaswar unless until this is the outcome of our skill India initiative. I can cite an example during this pandemic time in city district of Gorakhpur. One group of official in the leadership of district magistrate to how to tackle this lockdown. They have created their own e-commerce network for the district. This is the blending of technology, risk skilling, upskilling and the need of the market. In that way, we're taking the lot of things has to be done. That is that is the region. Prime minister given the new education policy, the employability and knowledge both has to blend and skill India is one of the outcome. Ilyan Dehes to a great extent would you agree that skilling is driven by self-selection. Those who are ambitious, who have the hunger and the desire to stay relevant over a 15-20 period in their careers going forward will make the investments in time, effort, energy required to upskill themselves. Whereas those who have moderate motivational levels may not be as enthused. They run the greatest risks of being disrupted. How can companies and governments try and ensure that the opportunity for skilling is more equally available and not just more equally available, more equally utilized by those who may not have the high level of motivation of those who want to go out and pick up every new skill that is in the market. My answer is related to what I said in my first intervention. It's really the three parties, the three bodies that have to work together to make sure that the individuals are on one hand incentivized, why not also financially motivated to stay competitive in the labor market. Because it is not only important for themselves, but it is important for the employer. And it is also important for their country because their country has to stay attractive and competitive in this global world. And so if on one hand the motivation is not there, I think the system, the systemic approach should make sure that this person is motivated to take this lifelong learning path. And perhaps one of the the conclusion of an initial assessment is that this person has to leave the current role, the current companies, and eventually the current industries. But the system should make sure that this person is getting the right skills of skilling and reskilling to move on to another job, eventually in another company, in another industries. But that his capabilities stay relevant in the economy. So you need to stay relevant as an individual, as a company, and as a country. You know, one of the things I'm interested in knowing from you, Mr. Dejesus, about what do you think happens when a few months later governments in Europe and in Northern America start pulling back from a lot of the very generous in income support goals they're giving to individuals and to companies at some point in time. The financial tab will need to be squeezed. And what could be the consequences of that? And how should we be doing the consequences are pretty clear. So we expect then a serious increase of restructuring layoff in some industries, massive layoffs. And I would the challenge and the political challenge is to synchronize, to synchronize the job destruction, with the job creation. And so that's why when I'm preaching for having, let's say, a strategic support, allowing people to already today upskill, reskill themselves, it will allow the the synchronization to take place. Otherwise, statistics of unemployment will really arise tremendously. And we will enter again in this negative spiral of unemployment, increase, recession and so on. If we are able to really create new jobs, to reskill people towards these new industries, these new activities, this will limit the impact of the structural change that will take place through restructuring and layoff. Guy Reiner, do you foresee this eventuality as well as governments pull back on financial support to companies and to individuals? A lot of concern in many of the reports about the massive layoffs, retrenchments, joblessness that we end up having to deal with. What is your prognosis and do you have a solution? Well, I absolutely follow what Alan said. Sequencing is crucial here. It's clear that furlough schemes, job support schemes, income schemes are not a permanent state of affairs, but there is enormous danger, I think. Let's look back to 2009, 2010, where we had a premature return to what was politely referred to as fiscal consolidation. Today, governments are not all governments, but many governments are in a position to maintain the type of support, which is absolutely necessary to keep people attached to the labour market, to do all of the things to mitigate the economic and social consequences of the pandemic that we need. But it's not a permanent state of affairs. So it is about sequencing. It is about being strategic in the way that Alan has referred to. All of these things matter a great deal. Can I point to one thing which I think is a looming danger in practically everything we've talked about? And this is the aggravation of polarization of labour markets and growing inequality. It applies in respect of skills. Yes, Raoul, motivation may be different amongst individuals, but what is much more different, if I can say that, is access to educational and training opportunities. Those in a position to acquire new and needed skills are much more those who already have skills than those who have none. And I would say the same in terms of the restructuring that is coming down the line. We see some sectors actually doing very well at the moment, the high tech end of the global economy doing very well, the low skilled, they're doing very badly. Those who have to not adapt to new circumstances, because they can't, but just to be resilient and to carry on. Think of the 1.6 billion people who still work in informality around the world and with the people online today, we must think of those as well. We run the risk of coming out of this crisis even more unequal and divided than we went into it. And that should, I think, inform all of our discussions. Very interesting, Mr. Yo. Can you share what you believe are the best practices of the government in Singapore, which are relevant for countries outside, countries which may not have the level of technological, economic development or education levels that your people in your country do. What of the Singapore model when it comes to skilling, do you believe is a case study for other countries to try and replicate? Well, Singapore is obviously very different and we are also very keen to learn from others. I would perhaps just share two perspectives that may be helpful. The first is in relation to the withdrawal of support schemes that have captured employment levels the way they are. I think it is quite clear that it won't be possible to save every job. The transformations will continue, but we must all try our level best to save every worker. And in relation to what a guy was talking about earlier, particularly for workers at the lower end, the risk of permanent dislocation are very real and the long tail of support that will be needed for this group of workers is something that we must keep in mind. So the way in which we are thinking about it is that even as we are planning for the withdrawal of very broad based job support schemes, we are putting in place new forms of support that essentially try to incentivize hiring in sectors that still have the capacity to do so. In other words, we want to redirect displaced workers into areas that still have the hiring momentum and to embolden the employers in those sectors to take on board people which they would not ordinarily do until they are very certain about the business prospects. So transiting from the very broad based schemes that incentivize the retention of the existing workforce to schemes that incentivize the hiring of new staff to boost growth, I think that sort of a transition is something that we are heading towards. The second thing, second perspective to offer is really this. I fully support the idea that employers have a part to play, but the reality is also that we cannot rely solely on employers, especially just a few enthusiastic ones, to train for future needs. When budgets are tight, employers are almost always focused on the present. They also tend to have a plug and play approach where they hire workers that are previously trained by a competitor firm, rather than to train the workers in their own companies. Now, at the same time, I think to rely on workers to upgrade themselves runs the risk that the training that they pick up will be outside of their prospective employer's needs. So you might have an even more severe mismatch of skills and needs of the workforce. So the way we are thinking about it is that we need to create win-win approaches for both the employers and the workers, as well as to get ahead of the curve to train in advance of needs. So one of the things that we have done is to try and scale up an intervention called the professional conversion programs. This is not the typical classroom type of training, but very much bespoke on the job that is tailored to the person, the industry, the specific job roles. We have programs in more than 30 sectors for different job roles. And the results so far have been quite encouraging. About nine in 10 of the participants remained in employment even 24 months after they participate in such programs. And about seven in 10 of them were able to earn higher wages. So the key is to try and scale these programs. And I would just like to note that they are certainly high resource, but they are also high payoff. Thank you, Mr. Yo. As always, I just love the level of thinking and planning that goes into everything in Singapore and your articulation of what you're doing. I want to take, as I said, questions as many as possible from those who are listening in live on the World Economic Forum website or on top link. I'll take the next question. This comes from Abdul Samad Dawood, Vice Chairperson of ENGRO and Director of Dawood Hercules. And this is for Salil Parik. And this is to do with emphasis saying that you're targeting engineering and IT students more from the STEM sector. So do you believe that it's only those who come from the STEM sectors who can be upscaled and reskilled? What is it that you believe needs to be done to target the larger population? There are so many people in countries like India, Pakistan, elsewhere who are unskilled to the extent that they aren't even educated. So how do we bring them up? Do you have any ideas about those who don't come from the engineering background? And what about those who are languishing in the ladder of skilling? So thanks, Rahul. I think that question is extremely critical. The focus for emphasis was on tech. We also have a focus on design and creative visualization. This is a new area that's emerging, which is very important because today all of us use technology is through how it's visually working with us on our cell phones or other devices. But that's still a smaller percentage of people. I think the point that the question makes is what do we do with essentially everyone in the population? And my view is of course all of that and all of those people we need to find a way to skill and upscale. And I think all different types of skills are needed broadly on a society platform. We focus as a company on one set of areas. But there are different areas, whether it's the arts, whether it's music, whether it's essential skills, vocational skills, all of those need focus and attention. And the point that was made by a guy with regards to access, in fact, maybe one of the more critical issues that we see across the world. And that's something that means deeper addressing even as we come out of COVID. What is the solution to access? Because otherwise we may end up being more inequitable as we are coming out than even as we went into the COVID situation. Minister Thio, there is this one question from Laura Renade-Garza. And this deals with the gender gap because the new report of the World Economic Forum on gender gap talks about the inequalities in industries like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning. How do we ensure that the opportunities for skilling, future job creation are more equitably distributed across gender? Do you have any thoughts and ideas on that? Let's start a question directed to all the women ministers only. No, this is for all. I just put it to you first. And I'm going to go across the earlier days and get into the conversation. I think it is a very important area. I think we do want to empower women to participate fully in the economies of the future. And I think it starts with ensuring that they are aware of the opportunities and they have the right role models because there is still a perception that some of these disciplines in STEM are more suitable for gentlemen. And so sometimes we have girls, even though they are equally talented in STEM subjects, they make the exercise the decision not to participate in these kinds of disciplines when they sign up for college education and even in terms of the first jobs after they leave institutions of higher learning. So that is one area that I think we are trying very hard to address. Having the right role models I think is critical. I think secondly, it is still very much the case in Asia, I think that in terms of the expectations of what women do, particularly in terms of caregiving, there is still an imbalance that we have to address. We can try and help in terms of government action to strengthen support for caregiving, whether it is for children or whether it is for seniors. But I think at the same time, societies are ready for a shift and for a more equal sharing of the family commitments that we are inevitably going to face. The shift is happening. I think that we can all make an effort to try and accelerate the shifts. Women are equally talented and I think from the perspective of many employers, they would really like to be able to retain female talent and to help their businesses to succeed. Not least because I think women are also very much consumers and having the female perspective in organizations are tremendously helpful. Both my wife and my daughter are going to be very unhappy if I ask this question only to minister to you. So therefore, Elin DeHiz, I must get your thoughts as well on how we make the upskilling revolution more equitably distributed across gender and across levels of education. This is indeed extremely important, especially as we see that this COVID situation is mainly impacting female workers in many industries. So again, I come back to my to my recipe of this tripartite engagement and coalition. It's about individuals, the choice of individuals and also really motivating, motivating female workers, female leaders to to to reskill, upscale themselves, but also companies, employers to take also the responsibility to reduce this gap and governments to work in a systemic way to incentivize and motivate individuals and employers. But Minister Teo said it in such a nice way, it's difficult to to elaborate after her. It was perfect for me. We've come to the end of what's been very engaging conversations. I want to thank all of you for lighting up this conversation on skilling at the World Economic Forum. I want to go across to Sadia Zahidi at the World Economic Forum for her comments as we bring this session to a close. Sadia. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rahul. It was such a rich conversation that I won't try to synthesize, but I think a few takeaways are incredibly clear. One, the next wave of government stimulus and support has to take a more strategic and sequenced approach into account and start building in the reskelling and upskilling now. And in fact, it need not be seen as a burden. We found this week in a research piece published with PWC that this kind of investment from governments could add six trillion dollars to the global economy by 2030. So there is a return on investment even from that perspective. Second, that our ROI is very clear for most employers, but at the same time we need to build in systems for those that may not get that support in the workplace. And at an individual level, not only are there vast inequities that got exacerbated for women and for young people through this particular crisis, as well as for people from different races. There has been different effects. At the same time, there's the biggest impact is lower skilled people are far more affected by this crisis than higher skilled people. And to Guy's point, if we want to ensure that this crisis doesn't exacerbate even more the inequalities we already had, the window for action is very much now. And that's where the World Economic Forum is focused. One year ago, we launched the reskelling revolution platform with the goal to provide better education, better skills and better jobs to 1 billion people by 2030. Over this last year, that set of work has already reached 50 million people. And that is exciting. But even more exciting is the work that has been put in place to build those lifelong learning systems. And I think that's what we need to get to because this is not a single shot effort. This is something that needs to be put in place at a systemic level. 10 countries and six new countries are coming on board in 2021. Over the last year, those 10 countries reached 50 million people, six more, so much more progress to come in 21. And much of their efforts will also be focused on the kinds of innovations from public policy that Alain talked about. Second, 10 industries because all of this has to also be nested within the realities of specific sectors. What's happening in the consumer sector is not the same as what is happening in the IT sector. So we're deep diving with 10 different industries and helping them reskill and redeploy their workers. Third, trying to put in place the right kind of language. Often the public sector, private sector and education sector are talking about very different things when they talk about skills. So we launched this week a global skills taxonomy, which allows everyone to dock on to the same language. And it's produced by a number of online learning platforms, the Coursera, the Udacity, the edXs, which together account for 200 million learners. And so they really have the right information about how to qualify some of these skills. With that, let me simply add that we invite all of you to join the Reskilling Revolution platform. Thank you so much to Rahul for your moderation today. Thank you to Director General Ryder. Thank you to Minister Pradhan. Thank you, Minister Teo. And thank you very much to Alain and to Salil, who are Reskilling Revolution champions. Thank you.