 Hello everyone, thank you for joining us. My name is Andy McAfee. I'm a scientist at MIT and I am the moderator today for our session on mobilizing a reskilling revolution. I believe on the screen we will see some housekeeping notes. Please be aware of those and please be aware also that the urgency of this task has only gone up. On our pre-call we were reminded that this reskilling initiative was launched just nine months ago in January at Davos and we already had a sense of urgency about it and then as everyone here is acutely aware the world changed and the COVID global pandemic and recession hit and the need to reskill large numbers of people around the world in shorter amounts of time has become abundantly clear to everybody. Luckily we have a fantastic panel today to help us think through these issues. Unfortunately we only have 45 minutes total for those of us who came in via top link and the first 30 minutes will be globally live streamed to everybody. So we are tight on time given the amount of good ideas out there and the amount that we have to cover. So one of my jobs will be to act as kind of a ruthless timekeeper and I ask everybody's forgiveness in advance for that. We have a fantastic group of people to help us think through these issues. We have Peter Hummelgaard who is the Minister of Employment for Denmark, Nish Kumar who is the Managing Director of the National Skill Development Corporation of India, Shirin Yakub who is the Chief Executive Officer of EDROC for Training and Social Development in Jordan, Henrietta Four who is the Executive Director of UNICEF in New York, Jeff Magion Calda who is the Chief Executive Officer of Coursera and Robert Moritz who is the Global Chairman of PWC. Peter if we could start with you could you please help us understand what you've learned via the pandemic and the response to the pandemic in Denmark and what it's what you're learning about re-skilling via this troubling period. Well thank you so much Andy and also thank you to the whole of the forum for this invitation to really be looking forward to this session. I think first of all I think it's it's very very vital for me to stress that I think it's very imminent that all countries and that is what also what we've been doing in Denmark is that we use our knowledge and experience to get out of the COVID-19 pandemic and and into creating a better future and we've been trying to set goals during the crisis handling where we tried to see that we want to to handle a crisis in a way that that creates a more fair society a better social contract between the individual and the society and also and especially and notably for this session that workers have the right skills for the jobs for tomorrow. In Denmark we obviously also face unemployment in in the response over the COVID-19 crisis. The Danish government is massively investing in education and upskilling so that the many people have lost their jobs can obtain new in-demand skills giving them opportunities to adapt to new industries with labor shortage. In Denmark within the government we has also reached two ambitious political agreements that strengthen the opportunities for upskilling and job focused education for the many unemployed following the economic crisis of the pandemic. The agreements contain initiatives for a total sum of approximately 100 million euro over the coming years and that is in a Danish context a lot of money I should be fair to say. With the agreements Denmark will make clever use of the crisis by investing in people future-proofing the qualifications of the Danish workforce. The agreements introduce 13 ambitious initiatives covering a number of new efforts targeted all groups of the labor market including and especially the unskilled, low-skilled, the skilled, the graduates and also the entrepreneurs. Extraordinarily and this is one of the key components in this strategy is that unskilled workers and skilled workers without dated training are granted a right to higher unemployment benefits if they begin a vocational education of in-demand skills and that's meaning skills for industries with high potential for subsequent employment during the pandemic and even after the pandemic and concretely that means that we pay 110 percent in unemployment benefits for those with insufficient skills today to begin an education with in-demand for in-demand jobs. Also we have for we also obviously have to focus on the youth unemployment we can see that in the statistics those who have been hit hardest by the crisis following the pandemic is the unskilled workers but also youth in general. So both young and more experienced can draw new life tracks get a new job if the old one disappears and therefore we try to educate for the future and I'm grateful that we in Denmark have made a tripartite agreement on apprenticeships it keeps the hand under Danish apprenticeships and makes it financially possible also for companies in difficulty to employ more apprentices in internships and also of course to hold on to the students and apprentices businesses already have and that's what we try to keep it up. No doubt we will need more skilled workers in the future. I believe that all of the responses that we have tried to make following the pandemic has been on a very very strong involvement of the social partners in all areas of the labor market and also this has been key to us that they are a key for the development and more equal and fairer labor markets during the COVID-19 if you could wrap up yeah sure and just to to wrap it up during the the pandemic what we have done is that we have had a very strong emphasis on as I mentioned tripartite agreements and we have tried to so to say broaden the responsibility to all sectors of society in handling not only the reskilling revolution but also the economic responses. Thank you for your attention. Peter thank you and again I apologize for being rude it's just that we have an extremely tight timeline. Shareen I'd like to turn to you. Learning has become more virtual than more remote in many cases just about 100% overnight much more quickly than we were expecting. Can you talk about what you've learned via this really abrupt transition and what you think the new normal for online education might look like as we transition hopefully quickly out of this pandemic? Thank you Andrew and Sadia and the team for giving me the opportunity to share our insights so online learning can play a huge role in upscaling and I believe it's the most powerful lever we have to speed scaling at scale. In the future of jobs report that was just released yesterday we see that one in two people of workers have to reskill and those who remain at their jobs need to update 40% at least of their skills and this needs to be happening now. They cannot drop everything and go back to campus we cannot wait for yet another year or two to help them reskill as Sadia was saying in our pre-session the window of acting and the opportunity to act is becoming much much smaller and fast and the need for solutions are much faster. So for example globally there has been a fourfold increase in online learning that is of people's own initiative and we've seen this first at DROC we've seen an increase of one million new learners joining the platform in less than five months a 400 growth in comparison to previous years we've seen how online education has helped sustain learning in the MENA during lockdowns and curfews so I believe that with this cost effective scalable solution that allows for iteration that leverages big data that provides just-in-time opportunities for workers to reskill we have a huge opportunity but equally important is the question of how can we actually leverage online learning to address this pandemic and the challenges brought about so there are four key components and I'll go through them really quickly for the interest of time the first is collaboration we really need to make sure we have coherent efforts going together from the public sector private sector and civil society joining efforts to make sure that we are leveraging all resources that are available and providing the investments needed to launch this skilling revolution and also we need to have some global standards fighting the design and implementation of these programs we're working now with the web on the global taxonomy and as part of the skills consortium three we need more investment in the edtech sector it was actually just identified as one of the 20 new markets and sectors that can have the potential to help us with recovery and we need more expansion in the definition of basic internet as a human right to include better access to high-speed internet so that more people can engage and we leave no one behind it's critical that the private sector also endorses the credentials or alternative credentials that the system offers because that will signal the value in the market and gives the certificates or this new certification schemes some currency in value and this will enhance the uptake among workers but also perhaps promote entrepreneurship and support entrepreneurs and encourage them to start investing more in this sector so there is no silver bullet here but we really through a purposeful leadership and proactive collaboration we can join efforts together to turn this pandemic in crisis into an opportunity to reset and this can only be done through collaboration and we just have to remember throughout this whole process the human at the center of it all and the time is to act now the cost of not doing so is just too high. Fantastic thank you for that Robert I'd like to turn to you and ask you a fairly similar question both you and I would imagine many of PWC's clients again have huge rescaling needs probably more acute ones than you were anticipating just nine months ago and at the same time your ability to deliver training and education to these people in person has very close to vanished how are you at PWC dealing with that and what have you learned what have you shifted about the way you think provide the way you think about providing skills to your team. Andy thanks very much for the question the business community PWC including that has a tremendous responsibility in this area and I'll break it down into four pieces first as you said every business cannot guarantee employment and they can't protect all the jobs they have but they do have an obligation an obligation to the employees today's employees and tomorrow's and to the communities in which they live so they've got to actually step up and deliver what I'll call the upskilling at their individual institutions and help society understand what needs they have going forward at PWC we've spent a tremendous amount of time with what we call new world new skills making sure our people are upskilling not only to create new processes new procedures new technologies but also adopt them and adopt them such that the workflow changes and making sure that is top of mind for all of our business leaders around the world is of paramount importance this goes back to the role every single business can play but the second role business can play is the fact that this is a very crowded agenda the reality is every government is worried about how do I actually can I think about the debt on my balance sheet now to what money do I need to develop and distribute vaccines we've got to make sure that the business community raises its voice in terms of making sure our government officials and other stakeholders involved in this conversation to keep the priority super high the third point for businesses like us is what can you do to contribute the future jobs report points to the fact that the only way we get this done is the public private partnerships the business community has got to help deliver in three areas help with what it takes to connect people help people have the hardware necessarily to do that connection and third make sure that we've got the content to deliver and we're teaching teachers how to teach in a remote and distant way and last but not least Andy is how do we make sure there's accountability in the system the web has worked with the international business council to talk about reporting which talks about what are we doing to contribute to the cause that gets to the issue of demonstrating progress and comparability and it puts the accountability back on the business community and our government leaders to move forward in the public private partnership that they're great opportunity of which now pwc is trying to play in all of those four pieces both for our own employees what we're doing to help our clients and for that matter what can we do to collaborate with others like you're going to hear for a second the friend Henrietta around the public private partnership what we're doing with genu and some of the stuff that we're doing with economic form great bob that was actually so concise that we've got time for a little bit of a follow-up can you talk internally what have you learned about how to keep delivering skills to a large global workforce that really can't get together in person nearly as much has this thrown a wrench into it or can you still be effective here the good news andy for us we've actually been on our own our own upskilling our digital IQ enhancement over the last four years so we actually made that transition pretty quickly and fairly well and consistently but here's what it required it required our leaders to create capacity in the system to give people time to learn it required us to give them content as well and content was not an assigned classroom at a given point in time it was continuous some self-study some classroom now virtual classroom and some was on the ground in this case now in the team chat in the google hangout in whatever format we may be using ultimately and it's got to be continuous continuously throughout the big ones organizations like us is how do you get more consistency of scale the second learning i would tell you andy is not just the learning to create the bot in the app it's learning to adopt it use it and apply that thinking that new skill to actually demonstrate there's a different process a different value proposition and these people will have more career opportunities going forward it's all about how do we give them skills how does it tie to their opportunities and how can you be a win-win for them as individuals and a win-win for pwc as well reinforcing that in that crowded agenda usually important got it bob thanks very much henryetta if we could turn to you you and your organization are laser focused on the up on providing opportunities to young people around the world but those young people right now face this really bad one-two punch of a global recession and a pandemic that reduces their opportunities for in-person learning so i'm wondering what you're observing about responses to that difficult situation what new ideas are you and your team seeing and how are how are young people around the world adapting reacting and being supported during this time thank you very much handy so uh let me start with the web's report so future of jobs this should be a wake-up call for all of us and that's what we need to get out in the world so that every government every school system begins to see this it's an urgent call for the future and what we can do about it so may i andy give you six ideas so one is we really need to put skill building at the center of the modern education claus Schwab has talked about this with the fourth industrial revolution but we haven't done it yet globally and it is a real area of anxiety for young people nine out of ten young people who are out of school during covet one point six billion of them so you can't assume that they're getting it at school so they need reading and mathematics they need entrepreneurial skills because eight out of ten in the lesser developed countries are going to have to make their own jobs they also need occupational skills and they need digital skills second we have got to shatter this digital divide half the world is not connected so we have to reimagine education and as bob was just talking at generation unlimited and through a gig initiative we are trying to connect every school in the world to the internet by the year 2030 this will change our world and give a chance to these young people we need to be sure that there's quality learning at the and the training the teachers is baked into it so that there's a way to learn it's modern we also need to make it affordable so we need itc ict companies who are willing to zero rate so that you can download learning materials for free and i think we may have some on this panel who will help us and we need devices for the young learners and we need to engage millions of young people to help other children learn third area bob was very passionate and eloquent about public private partnerships but we really need them so let me give you a couple of examples in vietnam sap is leading tech companies who are rolling out digital learning to every student in vietnam that's 21.2 million of them and their learning skills in Tajikistan we've got a skills development skills for work program that the government is putting in for secondary school and vocational training and in Bangladesh there is an apprenticeship program in which for six months you can be an apprentice with a company you can learn skills and right now at the end of that program they're 90 placement rates so we're aiming for a million of these young people to get this so this means you change skills the other thing we've got to focus on is investing in girls and women they are behind in the digital divide they their skills are not up to what we need so we have to focus on how to involve them it also means because we need women we need better paid leave in our offices we need family friendly policies without it the women won't have the time to be able to learn the new skills and lastly we really need to to change these these STEM careers so that they look appealing to women and men and to young people and they don't say oh that's too too difficult i don't want to do that but we do want them to do that this is an exciting future they can all be part of it so it's a wonderful opportunity for the world right now everyone should read the weft report and we have a chance to reimagine education reimagine skilling all over the world thank you Henry thank you Henry and we actually have a little bit of time i'm really pleasantly surprised to hear so many notes of optimism in your remarks am i hearing that correctly you are i mean bolivia in their school system they put STEM training in for girls they saw it was a big success so they're not putting it in every school so it changes how you think about skilling your country and the young of your country it's a great investment fantastic thank you for that and and these notes of optimism are so welcome menish we'd like to turn to you i i cannot imagine the the the scale of the opportunities and the challenges that a country like india faces with respect to all these issues can you share some of your insights and learning was with us thank you and you i think in the indian context in the normal time we would be running about 600 plus private partners would be running about 10 000 different institutes and we would normally skill about five million people and everything had to be shut in in end of march actually and then we expected that things would really get bad but but what we found is that the private sector very quickly innovated and we could also adapt to their innovation so over time we we went digital through our partners and we would be able to at least cover half the distance that normally we did in the normal year which is quite large we found that we have a platform colleague skilling their platform where we have a lot of a lot of courses out there it's almost we have almost 5 000 different courses with 20 different partners and some of them international partners almost 60 of them are free of cost and we teach in nine different languages and 37 different sectors covering from maybe agriculture to aviation to logistics to tourism or hospitality and all of these so what we felt what we found was that there's almost 22 times jump in the number of people who are learning online from february to what is now so that's a huge jump that's that's really occurred and we strengthened that particular part and that we see as something which will morph into a requirement in future too it'll become blended in my belief it'll not even completely online but the demand for online has really really picked up and even schools and colleges and universities are looking for that and we are making partnership with them secondly we found that a lot of people actually lost the jobs they were huge amount of migration within the country people moving from one part to the other and they lost the jobs so we quickly adapted with the help of private sector again and what really happened there is we have got an electronic employment exchange now and just in about three months time we started that in 10th of july and between then and now we have been able to offer almost half a million jobs to people to 800 to 800 different companies and that's I think something which we felt was very useful because apart from scaling is very important to connect people to jobs what we have used is AI based algorithms at the back end the idea being that people don't have to move too far away from their home places because there's so much of fear and they are they have very interesting innovation which private sector has done that if somebody is coming for interview the moment is near to the office you get a you get a message actually you get a signal in your mobile that the person is near to a text message and you can actually begin adopting your office to receive that person so innovations which actually is helping despite the covid times so we feel that the future in that sense is moving quite positively one last thing is that to ensure that the institutions can remain alive we have been giving soft loans to them we are also like a quasi we are semi bank i mean we are more like a developmental bank as we have given them working capital loans to ensure that they can tide over these difficult times up to march of 2021 we are quite confident that we'll be able to pull through most of our training partners but if it goes beyond that it's going to be a challenge obviously the government has many of the previous speakers said though despite their best efforts would find it very difficult to put too much money on scaling at this point of time but yet we have been able to manage quite a bit so that's what I wanted to say thank you very good thank you Jeff we are going to wrap up with you you and your colleagues at Coursera have been saying for some time now that that learning and skilling is at least digital centric if not 100 digital and that private for companies for profit companies have an important role to play here have all those ideas been reinforced during these covid times what are you learning they have Andy I I think the speaker so far I've hit on a number of points and you were asking you know am I sensing some optimism among with Henry I am among the panelists there's a lot of optimism here not clearly the impact on lives and health job opportunities that's been disparate by gender and by race here in America has been huge but I think that there is a promise not of a more equal opportunity and greater opportunity and not just a promise but we're all we're really actually seeing progress in terms of how it's happening so what I'll do is maybe talk about the the design of what seems to be working I'll give a couple of examples so one key part of the design of what's working is online learning platforms now Coursera happens to be one but take Coursera out of it for a sec there is something about online platforms so whether it's eBay or whether it's Lyft or Uber whether it's Airbnb the ability to aggregate lots of offerings in a place that is made then affordable to many people gives you the speed and the scale and the agility to solve complex problems and I think Shereen nailed the speed and the scale it also gives you collaboration so on the platform whether it's Coursera or others you have educators who are universities on Coursera we have 150 of them we also have industry partners we have IBM we have Google we have AWS we have Facebook we have Salesforce they are creating job relevant skilling programs online that don't require a college degree and don't require any background in the field so for those entry level digital roles you can learn the skills online the credential comes from a known branded industry player and and what's also kind of neat since they're entry level roles and many of these digital roles are being available with remote work the promise of online learning and remote work really creates an opportunity to learn and earn without having to leave your community so I think there's a lot of promise there we see great collaboration between universities and industry so many universities are not only authoring courses they're offering courses so a university in India will offer courses from Duke on say negotiation and courses from from Google on being a data analyst and the students in the university can take these courses it counts towards a degree so you still have a college degree but that degree has really been enhanced by the content that's that's available for both industry and educators I will also mention as an example of the speed and scale what's possible we had a situation here in the states where with respect to COVID contact tracing just as an example of how fast we can move with collaboration and platforms we had a case where the state of New York wanted to do COVID contact tracing they approached Johns Hopkins University within four weeks they had authored a five-hour certified training course on COVID contact tracing they put it on course error for free directly to individuals and through institutions within four weeks we had 400,000 people trained we now have 800,000 people trained and this is in the course of just a few months so there really is a speed scale and agility the final point that I'll just mention is the importance of bridging the digital divide I think governments absolutely need to focus on connectivity like they focus on power and food security and clean water but there are a lot of things that that institutions should be looking for you you really need to have a mobile piece I mean not everybody has a desktop computer not everybody has an internet connection at home not everybody has a private space to learn mobile is critical and offline is critical you need to be able to learn on a mobile device and offline and what we're now doing we just announced at the zoom global conference that you'll be able to record directly from zoom into Coursera and then download a low data version of the course so that people who have limited access limited data plans or limited income can actually get access to the content without having to spend so much money on the downloads and the digital connection. Fantastic Jeff thank you and thank you to all of our panelists for being this amazing combination of concise clear and brilliant I deeply appreciate it this is going to mark the conclusion of our lives of our live stream we are grateful people around the world for joining us and we hope this has been valuable for you thank you so much