 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the session on talent this morning. This is part of the Future on Human Capital series. There's been an overview session, which took place yesterday. There's the talent session this morning. Then we're going to have the education session and the youth sessions coming up. With the talent session, obviously, we're looking at not just individuals and how they can deal with developing their own individual capital, but also lifelong learning, the retooling of education, the refocusing of education, and how to make labor markets more effective. It's really about recruiting, retooling, and retaining talent. And for that, we have a fantastic panel here today representing many different sectors and approaches to these questions. We have Mark Durey, who is from Deco, which is a staffing and human resources services company based out of Japan, but covering all of Asia. We have Envy Tyagarajan, or Tiger, who runs as the presidency of Genpact, a rather large business process outsourcing company based out of India, but with people around the world, which raises a lot of interesting questions about the breaking up labor or the way we look at work in and of itself. We have Ronald Bruder, who following a career as an entrepreneur building shopping malls, largely in North America, is now running Education for Employment, which is a not-for-profit looking at helping retool labor forces in the Middle East, North Africa, and Kevin Taylor, the president of Asia Pacific for British Telecom. British Telecom has about 30,000 employees in the Asia Pacific region, which makes for quite a great deal of dealing with this issue of talent and trying to understand how to manage that across a very large organization. First, what I'd like to do is a little bit identify the scale and extent of the problem before we try to solve it. So maybe, Mark, looking at it from the market perspective, how big an issue is talent? What are the challenges that people are facing? Not just here in Asia, maybe first here, a little bit in Asia, where it's a particularly acute problem, speaking as somebody running a business unit, the biggest challenge we face in our business, in fact, is hiring people and finding the right talent. Is that a common issue in this part of the world? And how would you characterize this issue globally, given the number of clients that you're looking at and helping them find talent? Yeah, there's still a mismatch between where talent is and where it's needed. And there's also, in my view, quite an issue of the kinds of talent that is coming out of universities. We have very good students that come out of universities who have a great academic career, but there seem to be a disconnect between what's needed in corporations and the skills that they bring to the table. To address that, there needs to be, in my opinion, more close cooperation between the academics and the corporations. What is the scale of the problem? I mean, there's a lot of people looking for jobs right now. You're in the market of trying to ease that. Well, for example, we could probably grow 50% a year in our engineering business in Japan if we had the talent. We can't train them fast enough. We have to bring them in from universities where they're trained as engineers, if you will, on the rote knowledge, but then we have to teach them what that really means in the real world. And so if we could attract enough people who had that kind of basic background and if we had enough training space, or if we could hire them directly out of universities with already prepared to go into the workforce, then we could grow much faster. Kevin, BT, 30,000 people. You must have a fair amount of turnover there. Is finding the right people a big challenge? We have 3,000 directly in 30,000 with our JVs, by the way. No, not really. I mean, I think... The talent is not a problem. Talent is not a problem. I think... Well, we solved it. We don't have to have a session. I think it's taken a lot of time to ensure that your brand can attract talent. Your brand needs to attract talent. Right. And so for me, over the years, our BT has become a company where talent wants to join. Having said that from a wider spectrum, understanding the challenges that are there from a sustainability point of view, we need more talent coming on board. I also think the market for talent is changing. I think by 2020, you're almost going to get five generations of workers working together for the first time, which I think is a profound change. You're going to get people who are just not retiring and kids coming in. And so you're going to get this whole blockage. And I think the change is going to... For me, when I see the new graduates coming in, they're so multi-talented. They're using the new social dimension, the internet, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, that I think for the first time, the seniority piece is going to disappear and we're going to raise talent very quickly to get to the top. So people are going to get judged completely on capability. It's going to be interesting to see if it's like a football team. Your best play is up to 35, and not when you're 50 or 60. Tiger, looking from your perspective, you're effectively in the job of dividing off work and finding ways for companies to pass the work for you to find employees. What is the talent issue that you face in your business and how you see the market? So we are actually in the business of talent development and arbitrage. That's how we actually define our business. So just to dimension the problem for us, which kind of dimensions it for the world, 60,000 people, mostly emerging markets, so therefore 20% attrition. So that's 12,000 just to backfill and 20% growth. So for a living, we hire 25,000 people a year. The problem is that when we hire them, they're not ready to deliver the services that they are expected to deliver, which often is basic finance, basic accounting, financial services work, stuff that you would expect people coming out of colleges to your point to be ready to do with very quick training. We spend as much training them as we would training someone who's not a college graduate. We hire only college graduates. So it makes very little difference in that sense from your perspective, whether this person has gone to university or not. Absolutely. Which comes back to Mark's point about the university is not preparing people. So in effect, and this is not a reflection about us, I think it's a reflection of a large number of people in the industry. We have our own university. We have our own curriculum. We train our own people and we keep training them. Now some of that is actually probably the way the world is going to be because to Kevin's point, if you have someone who's worked for five years and is a great performer and has learned a lot five years back, it may be irrelevant today. So how do you teach people new stuff that they have no chance to learn unless you actually have a program that teaches them regularly? Okay. Which sort of segues very nicely into Ronald's domain, which is retraining and retooling. What is your experience in terms of the success rate or what are the best approaches that seem to work in what you're trying to do? We operate in the MENA region. We operate in the MENA region, Middle East, North Africa. And so we have found that the youth there that enter the labor market are not prepared, they don't have the right skill set to do the work that's needed in the region. For instance, Tiger and I were talking about his needs in Morocco and it's my hope that when we leave here we will solve a lot of the problems for him because that's what we're good at. That's what we're very good at. We've learned that, for instance in Jordan, another country that we do a lot of work in, unemployment for college grads is twice what it is if you're not a college grad. So there's obviously a disconnect. And that in many of the countries that we operate in, the situation is that the employers cannot find the labor that they need. We're told that by the year 2035 100 million new youth need to enter the labor force not be unemployed in the region in order to have the same status quo which is not all that great now. We have 50% unemployment in many of these countries of youth, not a sustainable model for democracy which is why we do what we do. And what has proved most effective? What is the most effective technique for retooling? Well, quite frankly the most effective technique is we work with employers who work backwards. We have local boards, local foundations where we work on a franchise model and it's the local foundation that decides what the needs are. And our board members are serious employers and one of the reasons they're on the board in addition to helping their country they want to find themselves the proper labor that they need to be able to grow. So for instance in Palestine there are thousands of engineering graduates coming off the labor market into the labor market every year with very few jobs. We built a course in concert with a company called CCC Consolidated Contractors they're the largest employer in the Middle East. We take some of these youth and we built a course in Colorado State University and we train them to manage construction sites which there is a need. And so we do that across the board and Jordan if you failed your high school exit exam you're basically unemployable. Well we teach these kids work skills which has been a very powerful program. So tying it very closely to the workplace is doing. Exactly. This is a by the way an interactive session and we'd like to welcome the people joining on the World Economic Forum website. Also would love to take questions and comments via Twitter, Sina Weiboah. The hashtag is weftalent weftalent or on Sina Weiboah weftalent hashtag again. And you can also send in an email to talent at weft.ch or here in the room raise your hand either way. So Mark you're quite passionate about this retooling and tying the education more to the marketplace as well. Universities are they closely enough working with the or associated with the workforce to bring out graduates who don't need maybe tigers same level of training and what can be done to address that. The approach that Ronald's talking about is very much working backwards from employer to university is there a way to address their universities directly? I think there's two approaches. First of all there are some universities who are probably doing a really good job of this who employ a lot of professors or instructors from the corporate world but there are many who are they're completely staffed by academics. I think what we need to do is have more corporate cooperation with the academics. In other words people like myself and I don't know whether any of you do this but I also teach a course at a university that's focused on careers in HR and things of that nature. This helps the young people who might be interested in HR career to be better prepared for that and to understand what it is what exactly is an HR career and that's point number one. The other side of the equation is how can we get academics to spend some time in the real world in the working world so that they know what they're talking about when they go back and teach the young people. It's really got to be a two pronged approach. From your perspective the universities are just too separated from the real world. At a certain level we want the university to be separated from the real world they're supposed to teach people ideas and things they wouldn't have other times but that's gone too divergent. It's too far the other side of the pendulum. Are there any examples where you think that it's been addressed in an appropriate way or well enough? I can't think of any off the top of my head now. So a big challenge. Which means we're going to have to accept that training level. Tiger have you tried to work back to universities? For us it's all about skill. You get universities to actually change their content so that the scale that they anyhow produce then solves needs of people like us. So the only way we found is to actually start partnering with the universities and to Mark's point some of them are very open to that partnership. Where you actually create content you inject that content into their regular curriculum and therefore the graduates who come out actually have trained in the curriculum that you want them to get trained in. Therefore they're better ready to work. There are two challenges. One it still needs in many many countries partnership between public and private because most of these universities are not necessarily private. So it's a public private partnership and governments are still our belief is governments are still far behind. They're not there. Second is some of this addresses hard skills. You can teach accounting, you can teach technology, you can teach a lot of things. How do you teach the way you work in an organization, the way you run teams? Those are more difficult. And I think universities take a long time to understand that that's equally important to be successful and to deliver value when you start working. That's often the biggest challenge that we face when we hire people. Right. Okay. Ronald. First program we ever launched in those six was teaching soft skills. Quite frankly at the time I didn't know how to write a resume. I think in Jordan with the education minister who was revered, he sat me down and said you need to teach soft skills. So the good news I have a really smart staff, I went back and said tell me what soft skills are and get me some. And we find it is phenomenal. We have a three month program that we built with McGraw Hill. And in that period of time we teach these kids how to write a resume, interviewing, critical thinking, leadership, team building, what to do with it. And they come out different people. They think out of the box. They're creative. They're empowered. They're self confident. They become self fulfilling prophecies. We shoot for 85% of our graduates getting employed when they leave us. And a key tool to making that happen is exactly what Tiger said them having the soft skills. And sometimes we link it, we do it by itself. Other times we link it to a skill. So for instance in Jordan, if you failed your high standard exam, we teach you how to restore and repair air conditioners. But more important than that or with that as a necessary ingredient, we teach them soft skills so they show to work up on time. They know how to play well with others. They know how to be productive. And some of these kids that were now teaching the repair and installation they're going to be the entrepreneurs of the future. We've had tremendous success. Kevin looking from the inside rather than looking outside of the world. I think it's a great opportunity for yourself to play, internal training. I think it's two ways really. Of course there's internal training, there's performance management through careers. But there's also I think huge learning that we get from the young talent coming into our business. The way they operate, the way they process, the way they think is so much faster. I think we're talking about talent in the 21st century. I think we're not talking about a shortage of talent in my view. If you look at the job data around the world, kids can't get jobs today. There's a lot of talent trying to get into business. And there are certain pockets where there are challenges like India, but generally I see a huge amount of talent coming in. The life is coming in. We've got to enhance the talent. I think you're going to see differences that typically people that came in got specialized in one area. And now I think the younger talent is smart enough to get specialized in a couple of areas. That protects their future. That gives them insurance as well. But I think it's a two-way deal. I think it's also companies learning from the younger talent coming in and the different ways of thinking. We actually interview kids across the world from the age of seven and eight of my kids, for example, and we put them together where they'd be in Hong Kong, New York, London, and we put them together over telepresence. We actually start to understand the way they're developing, the way they're thinking, the way they're parallel processing. It's an amazing thing. Are you finding differences or sharp changes? Just anyone with kids here will tell you they're doing three things at once. They're talking, they're videoing, and they're also answering mum on the left-hand corner. They're multi-processing and I think we need to bring this new dimension of talent using technology into the business to improve the efficiencies of organizations. Today, if you look at the U.S., companies aren't the most efficient they've ever been. Look at the P&Ls, look at the balance sheets, look at the cash in market. I just think as we enhance more and more of this talent, I think it's going to be a huge upside for us going forward. But it's a different game. Also work-life balance. I mean, kids don't want to work seven days a week. They don't want to work at nine o'clock at night. Their work-life balance is also an important driver and they're using technology to give themselves that balance. And this may be a case where you're not going to be able to train somebody to do that. The companies are going to have to learn to adapt to that. That's exactly right. We need to adapt to the new workforce. It's not necessarily the workforce needs to adapt. What we've been talking about here a little bit is the workforce adapting to industry, but you're saying that it's a two-way street. It's a two-way deal. I mean, for me, it's all about us adapting to this new generation. And, you know, as older guys, it's tough to see, but these are the guys that are going to deliver the real acceleration through our businesses in the future. Mark, is this something that you're seeing as well? I mean, we've talked a lot about an adaptation, you know, the individuals needing to adapt, but is the system itself being changed by the new generation and the ways that they're interacting could be social media or other aspects? Yeah, I mean, this is a big issue for our business, for example. We're, you know, largely still a bricks-and-mortar business. People come to our office and try to find jobs. The whole social media thing is changing that. As a matter of fact, you know, you can work from anywhere these days. You don't have to have an office anymore, as Tiger was talking about a little earlier. You can work from home. You can work from the coffee shop. You can work 9 o'clock in the morning or midnight. Are there any concrete examples of how that's showing up in your business and the way that you do things? We're expanding our recruiting efforts through social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. There's still a lot yet to be seen as to how that's going to operate. But yes. So we have about a thousand people who actually deliver services from home. The challenge is, it's taken us five years as a program to get there. I wish that was 25,000. And the problem to Kevin's point is corporations are not willing to change. It requires corporations to change because they need to obviously firewall their systems and technology and all of that to allow someone to access information from home in order to do what they have to do. But if we find a way to make that happen across larger chunks of work, it saves all kinds of things. The environment, it saves work-life balance. I think it brings a whole new workforce into the workforce. Think about the number of women who would then join the workforce if they had more flexibility in the amount of time as well as the fact that they can do work from home in chunks of four hours and five hours. This would change the way work gets done. From your perspective, you're trying to find all these ways we can move these chunks of work so that frankly you can grow your business and have more clients. Because it's there. And leverage them. This is all a cultural shift. It's very difficult for organizations to do. Kevin. I think we have over 20,000 home workers in the UK. 20,000 home workers. It's great because B, we also offer it as a service to our customers. C, it saves a ton of money and property. Which is always good. Property is never, never cheap. And D, it gives you the work-life balance you need. I think there's going to be a change, actually, because this is home workers, but my personal view is the desktop is dead. Whereas for the last five to seven years, I've been working at home on a desktop. I think they now just work on the move. And whether it be down the coffee shop or whatever they're doing, I mean people just working online all the time at a device at their hands. And that's the game today. So when we're talking home working, it's probably working away from the office rather than working on the move wherever they're at. And that really is the new game. Very exciting. We have a number of questions coming in and also I'd like to highlight Somya Kanti who is going to be our rapporteur. He's the president of EduComp which is India's largest education company. The question coming in which maybe is good for Ronald is, yes, we've all agreed there are these generational changes happening. Working from home is possible when you have the technological link, but when there is a technology gap, when you don't have the access to this technology, there's a way to do that. Is this something that you're confronting in your work? We're kind of on a hybrid mode because the countries we're in are not as advanced. So a lot of our kids, 47% of the population, I believe, lives on less than $2 a day. So it's hard to have one of these with that kind of a budget. They're not going to have an iPad. No. Exactly. So it changes things. On the other hand, we are working closely with Microsoft in order to be competitive globally. We do a lot of English teaching because we want to get our graduates into the global economy. It's a key for not only getting the job, but continuing their lifelong learning so that they can stay employed. And so it's a different marketplace. You go to Yemen, I'll be in Yemen in two weeks, it's a different world. It's like going back hundreds of years. So the rules of engagement, and we need to conform to the local needs of that labor market. And so I originally envisioned that we'd do a lot more online training. And we do a fair amount of that, but reality is, in order to get the mindset created in our student, they need to have the experience of working with an instructor. This course that I mentioned earlier, that I think is... It's a face-to-face, can't be replaced in some levels. Can be, but many instances can't. And I find in order to have the product and have somebody graduate a course and have the skillset that's needed, they can't do it in front of a computer. They need to have an instructor. They need that interface. But we're making a... We're having an impact. We're having a tremendous change. This course teaching work skills is a three-month course and it's life-changing. But we can't even get beyond 25 students per class. We push the envelope up to 30. The magic ingredient of the change there in a mindset is the empowerment and the belief that they can think out of the box and the belief that they can succeed doesn't happen as easily. Tiger, India faces a lot of bandwidth constraints. Many of the markets in which you have a large portion of your workforce, do you bring people together to aggregate around technology or how do you overcome these? The reality is, if you look at the top 20, 30, 40 cities, which is where a lot of our efforts have been done, there's not that much of a bandwidth constraint. People do have access to bandwidth, the kind of bandwidth that you need not for video streaming, but for work to be done. That's not the issue. The issue is, you know, one, corporations allowing us to do that type of work for them. I.e., breaking down a wall or a security issue that they... And mindset issues more than anything else. Even if their technology head says, look, this is all completely secure, but I still don't want to do it because I don't think that's the way we do things. That's not the way we do things as a problem. The second is, when you have a distributed workforce, you still need to create a community. And I think some corporations are wondering whether they should allow social media to come inside the company. So we implemented two years back our own internal social media platform that allows exactly the same touch, feel and look as a Facebook, but it's inside. That allows people to form expertise to solve problems. And over time, we've actually expanded that to people outside the four walls of the company. Because then you can access expertise outside because the true learning happens when you do it as a continuous learning and you're learning from the entire ecosystem, not just people you know and people who are looking at you. Right. So people learning, peer-to-peer learning, effectively. You're not having the top-down style. Right. We've spoken a lot about this sort of end of things, a little bit now on retaining and sort of a focus. Kevin, you and I had a very interesting discussion about how at certain levels in a company you have to accept, even celebrate churn where at other levels really it's unacceptable and you need to focus on it. Maybe speak a little bit of your approach to retention. My personal approach is I always look at my top 50 in terms of talent. Out of 3,000? Top 50 in the business and the top 50 are not necessarily a fixed 50. They might be promotions and relegations within it but to me that's the talent I absolutely have focused on keeping. I mean that's my keep 50. Underneath that you have the middles here and I think a good 10% plus churn is reasonably healthy and I think that gives the ability for us to bring more younger talent into the business, more new talent into the business. So to me I think a flexible workforce churning the workforce is a positive thing. I'm also a great passionate believer in performance management and I think What is the tactic for retaining the top 50? So our tactic to retain the top 50 I think you need to look at career development, ambition make sure that's satisfied make sure obviously the financial side is also their stock is there. So a whole combination of different things to keep that talent in place and from my perspective from my personal perspective that's actually worked so a multitude of different things but you also are bringing in new dimensions that people are the younger part of that 50 is typically not wanting to work all weekends, not wanting to work at 1-2 in the morning so the work-life balance factors coming into this 50 as well now which I think is a very positive thing I also think a new dimension is diversity in terms of talent. I think we need to I think we're starting a process of diversity we're starting a process of gender balance in certain countries like Japan is a long way to go. I think we need to bring disability into play more in Asia I think that linkage isn't as strong as it should be. So there's a whole aspect of diversity talent coming through as well we need to consider. Mark if you could speak a little bit about the retention issue both the higher end which Kevin is talking about but also other aspects and the value of churn maybe and before you begin for people joining us online please send in your questions to hashtag weftalent or an email to talentatweft.ch weftworldeconomicforum.ch as in Switzerland Mark. Yeah sure, retention is a very important aspect of our business because it costs typically more to go find new talent than it does to teach and to retain talent and a part of it from the lower end of the scale you always have to take care of the hygienic factors first can they eat can they have a roof over their head and then going beyond that to how comfortable can we make their life but it's more than that I think do they want to work with us why do they want to work with us what do we represent you know our motto is better work better life just from our company perspective so are we able to help these people have better work and therefore translate that into a better life part of that is are we giving them the tools if we demand a certain level of output are we giving them the tools so that they're able to do the work productively without having to do it at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning and I think this is really important and this is not only the high level people but the low level people because they're also working on their cell phones and on their iPads can you speak a little bit about non-monetary compensation what are the kinds of things that you found motivate people get them to stick around that aren't necessarily money, cash yeah a pat on the back is a real good motive I'm serious about that and the pat on the back can come from your your direct level boss but it can also be some form of recognition from two or three levels up could be the CEO and it can be the walk around in the branch on the one hand but it could also be when you have people who are doing a really good job let the rest of the organization know about that what did they do how did they do it and give them that recognition that they deserve Tiger so for us this is extremely core to our business managing attrition retention particularly in the markets that we serve from which are hyper growth markets themselves so you know one you know we drive performance management pretty maniacally a little bit of our heritage is that so performance management you're measuring how these are your goals and it's a very clear to the individual what they are supposed to and we track that and we track it not just for lower level people but right up to the top yeah we expect 10% of the workforce to churn at all levels of the organization and we expect every leader to show that they have done it their performance is measured on whether they have been able to do it you've retained too many people you have not taken 10% of the people who have not performed out that's a goal that allows fresh talent to come in and the third is while monetary compensation and options and all of that are great our belief is that it only solves short term problems you obviously have to do that but the real motivator is can you provide more exposure can you provide more training can you take the people to levels of performance and expertise that they didn't imagine they could and it actually starts with recruitment have you got people who are actually hungry to learn because if you have that then you can match that with offering them the food for that hunger and then it's a great match if you don't have people who are hungry then it's a problem so you have an attitudinal problem so you have to make sure your hiring is right so we do a lot of Six Sigma analysis on that actually retention starts with hiring right so getting the right person in the work to begin with Ronald maybe you could speak a little bit about this issue of retention we work backwards we are on the other end of the product line we're training for jobs and one of the sales points that we make is just the opposite because in the Middle East there's a huge amount of job turnover and so the fear of a typical employer that we deal with is that they're going to hire an individual that we train in six months that person will be there for various reasons and so these are unacceptably high levels that exact tremendous cost on the company and so we run our students through this workplace success teaching them how to work better we also work in close collaboration with employers so often times the employers will be with us in the room interviewing prospective candidates so that everybody knows what they're getting up front it makes for a much more cohesive product and a much more fluid process when we take somebody from the interview to the training to actually starting on the job additionally to keep the retention which is our challenge it's not yours in terms of the other side of the scope we offer the training we offer the placement and equally important the third leg of what we do is we offer our alumni continuous training and so manpower group for instance gives us for free courses that they charge thousands of dollars for and all of our alumni have the ability to take these courses at no cost so that they can stay ahead of the curve and they can continually be productive as their company evolves as they evolve and we have alumni centers where alumni come in they get mentoring they have computer access for instance in Yemen a lot of the cost of the alumni center has been now defrayed because the alumni are so happy to have it that they're donating in Egypt for instance the alumni were so engaged that up until recently 60% of our alumni were donating back a number that was 10 times what I expected on a good day why because we're giving them the tools to continue to retain their job and continue to grow let's talk a little bit about one thing coming up here is the hiring process it's important in the retention process maybe Kevin if you can speak a little bit about how that works from your perspective and maybe how it's evolved in the last 5-10 years I think that's changing as well obviously we're connected to a large number of universities across the world hiring talent through our graduate program one of the interesting things that we've recently done as an example in Hong Kong is to the younger kids who perhaps have not come from the right social stability background where they don't really have an opportunity to go through to university but they're equally as intelligent and bright and they just haven't had the chance and what we've done with a number of companies actually there's China Light and Power and the Jockey Club and HSBC and others is we take these kids in for 6 months and we rotate them and as soon as any of us like them we hire them and these are kids that typically wouldn't get through the front door so they wouldn't because they haven't got the opportunity to go through the university to earn 1 trillion of debt in the US currently in the university debts but I mean to me that's a great initiative so from a social dimension we're creating kids who are talented but for sure it's good and that's worked out very well I think we're in the third year of the program and I think this comes back to Tiger's point you don't all have to have gone to university they're going to Genpax University in that case so it is changing Mark for hiring what shifts have you seen and how important is that process I think part of one of the real important aspects of the process is to make sure that people who come to interview understand what it is that they'll be expected to do for example we have a lot of people being in an HR business there are a lot of people who have the idea that they're just coming to help people get jobs and of course they are but it's much more difficult than that you have to face a lot of rejection customers don't always want the candidate that you propose to them who seems to be the perfect candidate exactly so it's really important that they understand that yes there's an HR aspect to the job but there's also a sales aspect to the job as a matter of fact every job has a sales aspect to it these days and as it should be but getting them to understand that is a real differentiator I think in our business as to whether they'll last for six months or six years or much longer than that okay I would like to open it up to questions in the room if there are any please raise your hand we have microphones ready we have quite a few questions here take this one in the front row first please identify yourself I'm Aftab Ahmed from Pakistan in most of the developing countries it happens that young students and the researchers they go to the jobs in industry or in the government sector and they are mostly interested in that if we go for a small enterprise then most of these young researchers they can get the job and they can employ others so how we can actually change the mind of the people that they can go for a small enterprise in developing countries because there is no such trends how can you encourage how do you encourage talent to join small enterprises rather than bigger enterprises it's quite interesting actually and I can't talk for Pakistan but certainly with my kids I would encourage them to actually go into their own businesses themselves and develop their own SMEs I mean I think there is just such a wall of talent plus technology plus opportunity now in the SME space from a personal perspective I would encourage my kids down that route than perhaps working for a large multinational so I think if you look at any economy SMEs is really the in the western economies is really the big part of the economy if you look at Hong Kong 80% of the economy is SMEs I'm not sure what the percentage is in the US but I'm sure it's a huge number so that's the big segment actually but there are more opportunities in effect in that zone and there's more opportunities there's more initiative there's more vision to be applied so I think to me I think that's going to be a desirable place to go in the future I looked at it from your perspective as large company how do you look at somebody who's had experience in a small company do you only consider somebody who's had experience in a previous big company? No I think people have had experience in a small company and it depends what they've done obviously can bring really good insight into a larger company what I do like with people who've been in a smaller company is they tend to have a real natural hunger to make things happen they tend to be multifunctional maybe you don't see bureaucratic walls no bureaucrats bureaucrats are not there they haven't had HR departments and stuff to do so I think it's Kevin that would be an exception I think most large corporations to be honest would prefer and end up therefore biasing their hiring to people who spend time in large corporations now if someone has spent time in large corporations and small enterprises I think that's a perfect because they have the best of both but I think the question was more what if someone only wants to join a small enterprise and how do you encourage that to happen I think one of the challenges is those small enterprises have to professionalize themselves a little bit more because if you go back to the question on retention one of the reasons one of our single biggest findings for people leaving is their supervisor they don't like in small enterprises often the supervisor is the owner so how do you teach the owner to manage five people in a very professional way because then the chances are those people join and they last and they don't leave and so on so you almost have to have programs that professionalize ownership and the way they run small enterprises and you're sort of making a pitch in a way that there's real advantages to joining a large organization because you'll have that opportunity to grow where if you're running your own shop and it's a five person shop yes you'll have those advantages of being a self starter you're not going to see bureaucracy but you might not have those learning advantages that everybody here on this platform I would think so I think a mix is what ultimately works really well everybody wants to talk yes one of the challenges that we have in Middle East is there is a mindset amongst the youth which hopefully is changing where the ideal job is working not for a small enterprise but for working for government these governments are saturated they don't need any more employees it's in Egypt the joke is the government pretends to hire you and pretends to pay you it could keep social it's almost like a welfare system so we are pushing away from that and one of our most successful courses is teaching entrepreneurship we also believe by the way that empowering women in the region is key to the success of the region we have a course that we launched recently in Jordan in entrepreneurship and one of the shocking statistics that pleased the heck out of me was that 80% of the enrollees in this course teaching entrepreneurship are women apparently the culture is such that they have less of a fear of failure so they're willing to go out and join that small organization or launch that much more so and it's a great opportunity for the workforce which we think is key to the success of these countries okay Mark that's exactly right entrepreneurship is one of the points I wanted to raise but I'll just go on to the other one which is that universities need to promote the idea among students that they should focus first on what they want to do and second on who they want to do it for because often they're doing the reverse exactly they say they want to work for Asoni or Atoshiba or whatever as opposed to saying I want to be an accountant or I want to be a salesperson and they should develop their skill first in the occupation find their passion first and then figure out is it a small company is it a big company excellent very good question there's another question a whole bunch of questions first the gentleman and then the lady next wait for the microphone we have the online viewers who please send in your tweets and your I'm Aruna Grawal from India Patna I have two observation one is training for innovations doing innovative works and another is training for the regular works second observation is migration is natural from developing countries to developed countries or from a developing companies to a developed companies or from SME to big companies this is my observation observation rather than a question okay the lady next to perhaps has a question my name is Christine from China and I have a question for the panels what's your comment on today's MBA education do you see the MBAs have how will you rate the MBAs job performance versus the ones that are getting experience on the work in general this is my first question and my second question is how will you define a talent what is the top one of a talent of a talent of a talent okay well let's focus I like the MBA question in the sense that you are looking at sort of advice career advice we haven't sort of taken an angle on that switch around the optic you're talking to a young person who's maybe thinking of a big enterprise or a small enterprise they're thinking about doing an MBA what are the pieces of advice you give them should they be aiming for an MBA and maybe that's not an option for them what are I mean Kevin spoke earlier a little bit about specialization what's the career advice you would give to somebody entering this workforce right now how they should move forward I'd love to get that I mean my perspective is if you look at the percentage of unemployment in students around the world as I said not in every geography we're probably more blessed in Asia than anywhere else but my clear advice would be following universities to get a job as quickly as possible that's number one as opposed to university MBA yeah don't go straight in for that MBA get through the door because one of the other concerns I've got is the amount of debt the kids are coming out with and debt that potentially they won't be able to pay off you know it's quite interesting I don't know if you know in the US the government's actually underwritten all the student debt there it's another price tab there but coming back to the question the first thing is to get a role get a role preferably in something that you really like I think that's really important and then secondly when you start to develop your career I personally wouldn't say look at an MBA till four or five years at least of experience in the workplace and then there's value there's value from a broader perspective of course but I mean the clear thing is to me don't be one of the 20, 30, 40 in Spain 50% graduates are unemployed I guess it's a function of the marketplace in which you're employed and in countries that I operate and we're in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen Gaza, West Bank, Tunisia there's an inverse correlation between more education and employability as I mentioned earlier in Jordan unemployment right now is 14% unemployment for college grads is 24% so probably if you have an MBA you should get educated but you should get educated in fields where there's a demand we're now working in Morocco we're working with one of the largest universities and we are helping them increase the percentage of the graduates that actually get into the labor market their graduates and this is a large university public university 7,000 grads a year the percentage of their graduates that get employed is very, very low and so we're now working with them and it's our hope expectation that by revamping their curriculum and methodologies we can get them up to the level of 75, 80% which is about three times where it is now so in the region that we operate to answer your question an MBA does not solve the problem it can make a bigger problem because there isn't a market internally yet the economy the systems haven't caught up with the need for an MBA clearly there'll be need, it's a good thing I have two MBAs but I operate in the US on a different basis of operation you have two MBAs one wasn't enough what can I tell you I was insecure but in the US it was helpful in the countries that I'm operating in by and large it would not have been helpful but I think the lesson you're talking about isn't just applicable to the area in the world you're talking about I think it's also valuable when you're making those educational choices is a market is giving me skills that are going to give me a job when I come out or am I going to be the 24% of those highly educated who don't have jobs so one is we do find depending on the market MBAs who don't have any work experience to actually not get any practical knowledge through their MBA and that's a problem so they come out even more theoretical than otherwise they are and two they also have a chip on their shoulder the theory plus chip on your shoulder is a bad combination in a corporation so the recommendation would be you contrast that with for example the US where we also hire a lot of people but the MBAs there have worked before have spent time in organizations and then when they do their MBA even though the curriculum may not have enough of practical stuff they can relate it back to practice so I think we have much better success in terms of hitting the ball out of the park when you go after MBAs in more developed economies I think the developing economies have to fix their MBA programs so you think even the MBAs themselves are having less relevance they do and they take time to adjust to the corporate life plus they have a chip on their shoulder so you first have to knock the chip off in any case most of them end up joining investment banks so clearly not joining your organization but if we can fix the practicality of the content it is a great career path because it does broaden your perspective rather than keeping it narrow it allows you to connect the dots and then you can apply it in practice I think it's a great combination you must combine it with what the market wants we built a mini MBA program we call it a mini it's our own language and what basically it does it takes university graduates that have the theory and don't have the work experience and the practical knowledge and it teaches them to solve problems takes them through eight quarters of a business cycle and throws all sorts of challenges at them and they have to come up with solutions right so in other words it's a modification as we've been talking about of the educational system making it more adapted to the market so mark final thoughts here this comes from somebody who doesn't have an MBA you don't have to when I came out of university that was my goal I wanted to go get an MBA and I thought that was the greatest thing since sliced bread but after working for a few years and finding my passion and reexamining that I figured I didn't need it anymore and so that's what I would suggest is first of all as Kevin said go find a job first go find a role do some learning keep the goal in mind if you still want to do it after three years or four years then ask yourself why is it that I want the MBA and what is it going to do for me when I'm done and if you still want to do it after that go for it excellent okay we've heard a lot of ideas from our panelists today we're relying on Somia Canti from educomp to give us a good resume but we've been talking about social media specialization the hiring process retooling education was certainly a focus that everybody had here the changes in the way that the work force itself is adapting to work hiring and finally MBAs I would like to thank our online audience for their great questions our audience here for the questions and of course our panelists for their insights into managing human capital thank you very much for joining us here today thank you