 Hello everyone. Good afternoon to those of you joining us here in Davos and good morning, good evening to those of us that are joining us online. My name is Sadia Zahidi. I'm a managing director at the World Economic Forum and a great pleasure to be here with you for what I would at least say and I'm biased. It's one of the most important topics that we're addressing here at the annual meeting because without a focus on human capital investments, without a focus on skills, education and jobs, a lot of the other challenges that we've been discussing here at the meeting are not quite possible to address. And without a focus on that kind of investment in people, it's also not quite possible to reach many of the opportunities, many of the discoveries and research and innovation that's also being discussed here. So it's a fundamental part of the agenda of the work that is being done at this meeting. I'd like to kick off with some good news. In 2020, we announced along with much of this group a 10 year initiative called the reskilling revolution. And the idea was between 2020 and 2030 to reach a billion people with better education, better skills and better job opportunities, leveraging the power of all of the companies that come together at the World Economic Forum, all of the governments that we work with and also by setting up public-private collaborations both at the national level as well as at an industry level. Now we're four years in since the time that announcement was made and I'm delighted to announce that we have reached over 650 million people through that work. So well ahead of schedule in terms of trying to reach that set of people, which then of course gives us an additional challenge. What more could we do and how do we ensure that some of that reskilling, upskilling is more precisely focused on some of the greatest challenges that we face? What are some of those new and emerging gaps that we need to focus on in that race to reskill? And are there ways to speed things up without making it overwhelming for the learners themselves? And so to have that discussion, I am thrilled to have with us a fantastic panel to my extreme left, Jeff Majan Calda, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Coursera, and I know has a deep passion for transforming education, skilling and expanding access to knowledge globally. Welcome Jeff. Next to him is Aisha Rimi, who's the Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission based in Nigeria and driving transformative policies and initiatives that are aimed at fostering economic growth and sustainable development in Nigeria. Welcome Aisha. Next to her is Ashisha Advani, who's the President and Chief Executive Officer of JA Worldwide. And Ashisha's visionary leadership has been instrumental in fostering global youth development. And I'm hoping that we can hear a lot from him about how to bridge some of these efforts with younger people. Next to him is Claudia Zevedo, who is the Chief Executive Officer of SONE SGPS based in Portugal. And another visionary leader who is focused on leadership, innovation, reskilling, upskilling and ensuring that people are ready for the future of work. And finally, to my immediate left, Denny Machuel, who is the Chief Executive Officer of a DECA group and sharing a wealth of experience, knowledge and insights about what is truly happening in the global workforce and what are the needs of that workforce. So Aisha, let me start with you. We're thrilled to welcome Nigeria as one of the newest country accelerators that is focused on setting up public-private collaborations around skilling. How does the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission view upskilling and reskilling? Great. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for having me. Just by way of context. So the Investment Promotion Commission is the arm of government that drives and works with investors, domestic and foreign in the country. And so in doing that, so ministry sort of lays out the policy and we do, we drive everything else that goes with that. This is a new administration, and one of the first things they did was to set up a national talent program. And they've also set up, so sorry, let me just rewind a little bit. Fun fact number one, this skills accelerator program is the only initiative I think that Nigeria has with WEF. And Nigeria is the only country in Africa that actually has a skills accelerator program. So the government has set up what is called a national industrial revitalization program. And under that there's a subcommittee that's supposed to deal with skills acceleration. So of course in doing that, there's no point reinventing the wheel. This has been done world over. We're hoping to collaborate with WEF, with private sector to pick up on those lessons that have been applied across the world and to apply them in Nigeria. When we now look at investment or investors that are in country, we're trying to work with them to develop programs that actually train people on the jobs. And also to perhaps look into their CSR programs, and Ashish I think just mentioned program that they're doing in Nigeria, whereby we can have them set up programs that train up or skill up Nigerians, young Nigerians to be able to future proof their jobs essentially and prepare them for the future. We at the investment promotion commission, we are responsible also for working with investors to provide incentives. And as we now review, we're going into our review, which hasn't happened in probably about eight years. We're going into a review of those industries in those areas that qualify for incentives. And this is one of the things that we're looking at very closely, how we could add education, scaling programs. And I should say there's also a national technology acquisition program that investors are required to sign up to, excuse me, whereby in certain industries they're required at some point to train up and prepare Nigerians to be able to take over those jobs that ordinarily would go to foreigners. Thank you. Dennis Levy, maybe come to you next. We've been serving companies for quite some time. And in our latest Future of Jobs report, we found that 44% of the core skills of anybody in a job at present across those firms that we surveyed, 44% of those skills will be different in just four years' time by 2027. So everything that you are doing daily in your job, half of it may be different in four years' time. So just tell us a little bit more about what you're seeing in the workforce and what those skilling needs are. Sure. And thanks, Sadia. And we're very happy also to have been a founding member of the Risking Revolution initiative. So we're very happy to be active on that. If we take a little bit of the helicopter view, look at the reason for the shift in skills. I think there are three major ones. The green transition which is coming in, the digital transition as well. And the new one with GNAI, which is also disrupting quite a lot and will have bigger impact coming in. On top of that, there's pressure coming from a mega trend of talent scarcity due to demographics, but also personal choices that people have been arbitrating and continue to arbitrate between professional life and personal life, particularly in the Western world. So, I mean, this is happening and what we see from, you know, the discussions we have with our clients is that now talent is a C-suite topic. Talent used to be more transactional. It's now really top of mind in all C-suite discussions. And, you know, the adequate positioning is there to accompany those discussions, the strategy discussion. It starts by, you know, talent mapping. That's the first thing that we advise our clients on. Just, you know, look at what's your workforce strategy and, you know, where are your talents? Where are the skills that are going to be disrupted by what I mentioned earlier? The skills that have become obsolete. What are the new ones? So, it starts by that. Then, of course, you've got to ensure that you have the attractivity to, you know, to attract the people, recruit the right people. And there's a big, big topic that is also occupying the discussions at this C-suite is the deployment. And, you know, how you keep the relevancy of these skills over time. So, the internal mobility has become top of mind. But you cannot have internal mobility if you don't think the transferability of skills. So, that angle, and then, you know, CHROs and C-suite should really look at how the skills that are present in your company are transferable into new areas to make sure that your people, the people that you employ, remain relevant. And cultivating the employability of your people is critical to ensure retention. And, of course, there is the last piece, which we see more and more as an important topic is the career transition is sometimes, yes, you have to adjust to, you know, your workforce. And companies, you know, if you've made sure that your people are employable, transitioning them out when you're obliged to is much easier because people know that they have a future. So, thinking in advance on these topics, transferability of skills, employability, is a great way to prepare the future no matter what happens to the companies. Thank you. Claudia, could I come to you next? I mean, we've heard that broader perspective. Within your firm, what are you doing for that internal mobility? And also, what does that look like when you look at the wider community around you? Sure. In 2020, at the European Roundtable, we did a study with McKinsey of sort of what is for Europe, because this is a European group of CEOs, so we're more concentrated on Europe, and then I'll come to my country of, you know, to have a new vision for Europe, what would have to be done? And reskilling came up as a huge endeavor for the green and digital transition. And the numbers for reskilling, I mean, we know all of them, they're huge, like 100 million in Europe by 2030 in the WEF, reskilling 1.1 billion. And so, you know, taking these accounts, these numbers said, well, let's set up a process that has to have two things in mind. One is it has to be an end-to-end process because most of the sort of training, if you do a training, then you're not guaranteed employability or you don't do the right training. So sort of an end-to-end, we have to monitor the supply and demand, what are the new skills, try to have some strategic workforce planning, and then creating awareness for the candidates to go into this process. We had in the study like two-thirds of the candidates were unemployed didn't know about reskilling. So sort of putting everybody into the process. And the second thing was it should be a public-private partnership, you know, so dear here to Davos. So what we did in Sanay in Portugal, very much as a pro bono, not because we have the internal scaling, this is another project for everybody. We had a partnership between the Public Institute for Training and Employment that we sold them this sort of, because Portugal is one of the trial countries of the European Roundtable, and we sold them sort of this process and they liked it a lot because there was one KPI which is employability, and also with the Business Roundtable Portugal, so a group of 40 CEOs also on board, so a very strong public-private partnership. And we started everything from the beginning, so designing the training with the companies, and we've put a lot of effort in this program. The first year was just to set it up, right, to get everybody aligned, and we have now seven labs of different natures. And what we found in these three years is that to do the traditional way, we wouldn't scale to those dumpers, right? And so we are in the process of doing a trial in Portugal and Spain, which my company participates, but all that can adhere to this because it's an open, is a new career network which is basically a digital platform, a created digital platform where employees can search for training. Training can be on the platform, but it has to have a sort of quality check because trust is a huge topic, and then companies can go and search. So we're doing both the sort of traditional end-to-end, I wouldn't say traditional, but the new end-to-end training model and this new career platform that we actually in the process of developing it between Sonaya and Telfonica in Spain. Great, thank you. Let me go to Jeff next, speaking of platforms. Just tell us a bit more about what's been happening since the pandemic era where there was a big boom in online learning. How does that look now? And also, how are you integrating, for example, artificial intelligence to personalize a bit more of that learning? Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. I mean, clearly if you're into education, anything with education is exciting, but people often say that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And to a large degree, technology has made that true. Technology has created greater gaps between the haves and the have-nots. But I think that COVID really was a chance for people to try something that showed a new path to education where online learning creates a far more accessible and flexible way of learning a wide range of skills. And what also came along with it is remote work. So the idea that anyone anywhere has the chance to learn whatever skills are valuable to further their life ambitions and increasingly anyone anywhere. If you learn the skills and have the right credentials, those credentials could be a college degree. They could also be an industry certificate. If you have the right skills and knowledge, you could increasingly not only learn from anywhere but work from anywhere. And this could be, I think, one of the biggest breakthroughs. Now, as it relates to AI, there's a lot of opportunity. There are some threats. I think there's something that's important, a distinction between more traditional AI and generative AI. With more traditional AI, it was much more about the builders of these systems. Much more about the builders of the system. Can you hire people with the skills to build an AI system? It's a pretty concentrated group. And the skills are quite technical. They're very difficult to learn. With generative AI, it's a little bit different. It's not just how it works, it's how it's used. Generative AI will be a tool, a thinking tool and a work and productivity tool that will be able to change the opportunity set for almost everybody in the world. And research is coming out that is showing that there is a disparate impact in terms of performance improvement from people who use these generative AI tools. Notably, at least among knowledge workers, those with less experience have a bigger improvement in their capabilities when they use generative AI tools that knows with more experience. So this could close the sum of the performance and experience gaps. Now, in order to make it accessible, you need to obviously have good content that people can trust. So we work with big institutions, universities and industry partners to do that. You need to have good content that teaches the job-relevant skills. But you also are seeing now a new way to learn. And Bill Gates yesterday on the CNBC, Davos report that Shereen did, she said, what's the most exciting thing you've seen at Davos? He said two things. He said, the future of health care, this is going to be changed because of this technology. And the number two thing he said was personalized learning, because generative AI will not only give you the content and the credentials and the knowledge, it will give every single person a personalized coach or tutor that will help them, independent of your current experience level, will help people get more equal access to someone who can explain things, contextualize things, map things into the skills you need and the careers that you might pursue if you learn those skills. So it's not just the content, it's also the way that you learn. And what we've done at Coursera, which I'm also very excited about, is completely transform the language accessibility. So we have 6,000 courses on Coursera, most of them authored in English. It cost us $10,000 to translate one course into one language, until six months ago. It now costs us $20. We have now translated 4,000 courses from the top universities and the top industry partners in the world into 18 languages. We have another 10 to 20 coming. So language will decreasingly be a barrier. How much you make and where you currently come from, I think is going to be decreasing a barrier. And then it becomes affordability and it becomes sort of learner support. I'll say institutional support. So we work with governments, we work with businesses and we work with higher education systems to make sure it's not just, or not only people going to Coursera.org, but people also getting support from their communities and institutions that serve them so that they get the same kind of support that someone who maybe came from a more privileged background. Thank you. Now, every year we also try to ask businesses what they think are the highest skills in demand. And a lot of what comes up is, you know, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, teamwork. She's telling us a bit more about how the next generation can acquire some of those skills and how you do that. Thanks, Adya. It's wonderful to be here. What a great panel. One of the nice things about the reskilling revolution is it set a very ambitious target. So when you set a target of reaching a billion young people over a decade, it brings stakeholders together and they start to agree on things in order to move forward towards a target. So to answer your question, I think the way that at least our organization delivers programs is through partnering with both governments and businesses. Partly because we need access to the school day, so we need partnerships with government to give us access to the school day, whether it's for K-12 or for higher education. Having access to student time and learner time is critical. We partner with businesses because it helps us bring real role models to young people so we can actually impact their mindset, not just their skill set, to get them to realize that certain careers they didn't know were available to them and now open, which starts to put context into why they're learning. So for example, I'm so glad that this panel happens to have two of our partners on it, which we discovered in the chat earlier. So just to give you two examples. So the goal of reaching a billion, you know, J-Wirewide is honored to partner with you to do that because we are already reaching kind of over 10 million learners per year, up to now 15 million learners per year. So over 10 years, we hope to be able to deliver about 10% of the total target. So that's our aspiration. It's made us want to do more. And for example, we were talking earlier about how our partnership, Claudia, in Portugal helps us reach 30,000 youth, but also with 2,000 of your employees acting as mentors and volunteers and role models for kids. That's just a very practical example of how you can actually deliver a program in partnership. And we were talking earlier about Nigeria and our partnership in Nigeria just to give you another practical example where the government has actually mandated during Global Money Week that banks and businesses should provide role models in financial literacy education, jobs education for young people during that week. So without government actually saying that to companies, sometimes it's hard to actually change behavior quickly enough, particularly to hit scale. If you want to, you know, hit these ambitious targets, I think we need governments such as Nigeria to really lean in. So I'm really thankful for that. And of course, businesses as well to say we're going to actually give of our volunteer time to be role models for youth. Thank you. I'm going to keep with that particular theme of what you need from other stakeholders to be able to deliver that kind of skilling. And Jeff, from your perspective as well, we talk about public-private collaboration. Let's try to unpack that. What's needed from more governments if we want to get faster to some of this reskilling? Yeah, I think that a lot of it comes down to sort of a vision and a priority that is set just to say this is important. Usually it's a lot better if it's backed up by money and people in power causing that to happen. It's one thing to say, it's another thing to do it. We've seen, but on the other hand, private companies can get a lot done if they're sort of a playing field that's set so it's kind of clear how we can make progress. We have seen in the U.S. with the American Council on Education they review the industry content that's on our platform that comes from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and others. And they review it for integrity and for rigor and then they say we're going to give a credit recommendation suggesting that universities and colleges and vocational programs award college credit for these industry courses. In Europe there's a system called the ECTS, the European Credit Transfer System. About 20 of these certificates have now been ECTS credit recommended and there's 49 countries that participate in the ECTS credit system. India is doing this with the National Skills Qualification Framework. The UAE is doing this with the CAA. And so laying down the policies that say content, if it is trustworthy, credible, valuable can be delivered in an institutional setting that is largely controlled by government policy and oftentimes government institutions. Just laying out the system so that we can do this with clear guidelines and rules is super helpful. I also think that we see institutional collaboration between government and businesses, government and campuses where for instance in Kazakhstan, working with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the government not only laid out the policy framework for the credit transfer but actually subsidized, sponsored a set of industry certificate licenses and donated 1,000 licenses per school to 25 different public and private adult education programs so that they can also sponsor not the entire training but at least a pilot test so that universities don't have to go over the financing hurdle to at least start seeing how these types of capabilities can make a difference in the curricular offerings that are available to students. And Aisha, as our primary government representative on this panel, what's your view? What do you need from some of the educators, whether those are online learning platforms or others within the country? And what do you need more of from the private sector? Okay, so many things have been said and Jeff just keeps sort of making these points that resonate with me. You talk about talent being equally, what was it? Distributed but not opportunities. So everyone knows the numbers about Nigeria. There's 200 odd million people. So I mean the potential is that we have 65% I think under the age of 35. Not everyone is going to be able to go to university, get a college degree or whatever. So one of the ideas is to focus on vocational training and of course this comes with revamping the curriculum, working with the Ministry of Education, with private sector, and to get these national qualifications system in place. Like I said earlier, we're working with, certainly since I've stepped into this role, we're working with investors in the country to see how they can support these programs because government just does not, with the greatest intention in the world, it can't move as quickly. It's not as nimble as it would like to be. You have budgetary concerns and all of that. So working with private sector, of course incentivizing them and working with the education board. So another program which the government has started up is a skill artisans program. Because, and I think the plan is to skill up about 20 million over the next couple of years and get them to be actually certified so that they can use these skills across, not just Nigeria, but now even more across the continent as we now have the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement which is going to allow for easier movement of goods, services, people, you know, all of that. There's also something which is called the National Talent Export Program. That was launched by this government on the back, on the sidelines of Unger last year. And with that, again, there's a training program in place to skill up or reskill Nigerians because we found that, you know, the talent, like you said, was there and available but the opportunities were not. So they're plans to work with governments and I think Germany and the UAE have shown interest in acquiring some of these skills. So that's another thing that's in place. I think we are, a government has clearly shown this willingness, it's able, willing and ready to partner with private sector as we have shown with Ashish and really it's just a matter of moving it forward. And so the whole idea of being here today is to be able to tap into those programs that, like you've mentioned, that exist that we can learn from and we can domesticate. On that note, you know, it's not just private public, sometimes it's public-public collaboration that's really great. Yes. In the U.S. when we started these accreditation it was the American Council on Education and they've been around for a long time. We just did a memorandum of understanding with the UAE, the Minister of Education there, where their commission on academic accreditation actually is partnering with the American Council on Education to basically take their playbook for how they do the accreditation, start by using that framework and then they're building their own. Obviously we could certainly create a little broader collaboration if you want to see what that sort of playbook looks like. And then the other thing I'll just mention is in India the new education policy has set out this sort of credit transfer system which they call ABC, the Academic Bank of Credit. The framework is called the National Skills Qualification Framework, but the actual review is happening by NASCAR, NASCAR, which is an industry consortium. So you also have models where the regulators lay out the policy for quality assurance, but industry actually does the evaluation to say does this really meet the needs of industry. So that's an interesting kind of public-private collaboration even right there and that's happening in India. Fantastic, great. Sorry, just one last point. I think in the last few months as well what we've seen is we've seen an uptake in inquiries for business process outsourcing. I mean the request for information and how they can tap into this demographic dividend that we have in Nigeria has been quite impressive. Great, thank you. There have been lots of references on that side of the panel about employers. So Dennis and Claudia, maybe over to you. What do you need more off from skilling providers? What do you need more off from governments? Well, two examples that I would give. First it's all about anticipation and investment. So we're working at the moment with a French car maker who is anticipating the fact that the move to electric vehicles we had a massive social impact on all the people that were working on combustion engine vehicles. So we've come together because what they wanted is they wanted to really ensure that their supply chain, their suppliers would not be impacted either. So that's all about anticipation. So we've worked with them, we are creating, we do the skills mapping, we do with themselves and all their suppliers to ensure that and train and upscale and transition some queries to make sure that this is happening. So what actually when we came together, these two private companies, we went to the French government and they said because this is happening, I'm okay to finance that. So that's one thing. Second example is as we were embarking into JNAI, we wanted a technology partner who would help us build what we're currently building, which is a career platform. So we've signed an agreement with Microsoft to develop a career platform particularly targeted at the traditional underserved population, the blue-collar workers or frontline workers. So what we've done is we're creating a lifelong career companion where frontline workers will be able to have career counseling, will have to have access to job opportunities, skills mapping and what is necessary for them in the future, etc. So this is, we did that without any government support but it's really two companies investing together. Just one thing to have in mind, particularly with the JNAI revolution is the equal investment that is required on tech and on people. And usually when you talk about JNAI, we talk about there's so many millions or dozens of millions to put in tech. Well, you should put the same money, same amount of money in the way we are competing the people. Just one last thing. We've made a study, it's going to be out in a couple of weeks, 2,000 C-suite executives on this JNAI skills gap. 43%, only 43% of top leaders are saying that even their top managers are ready, have the skills that are necessary to understand the risk and opportunity of JNAI at the top level of the organization. So you can imagine this massive endeavor that we all have to do to get people ready for that. And there's already that question of who pays. And just one last reflection on who pays. From a business perspective and private company perspective, people with our accounting standard are counted as cost and not as assets in the balance sheet. So I hope as we progress on sustainability and new accounting standards, we can begin a social piece that at some point will be able to put human assets in the balance sheet and not as cost in the P&L. Thank you. Claudia, two questions building on that. One, how do you upskill and re-skill your own managerial team, your C-suite? And second, who pays? Can I answer the government one too? Please. I mean, as I told you, the program that we're doing is a public-private partnership also with the Trade Association. So I think that program is robust and we're just rolling it out. But if I zoom out and re-skilling has to become something that we do all our life, right? The traditional model that we have of subsidized government education, primary education, second education and university really has to change because with 20 years I have a university degree and then if I want to re-skill at 30 or 40 or 50 that I'll need to because I'll change jobs. There is no public funding as there was when I was 18. And so looking at that life cycle and re-skilling being so important, as you said, the skills we have today, we will need new ones in four years. So how can governments look at that and say our traditional model of subsidizing university probably doesn't work anymore? So we try, going back to now to your question, we try to be a very learning organization. So now we invest a lot of time in training. We're also very close to all these associations. We actually, we have six people pro bono doing the re-skilling operation and we try to be a very learning organization, not a know-it-all organization. We're very frank on that in the suite that you have to be a learner because it's impossible to know everything. It's impossible and things change. So you know something and the moment you learn it it's probably outdated. Thank you. And Ashish, can I bring you in for the view of the learner? How is some of this being taken up by the many, many young people that you work with around the world? So I think this question of who pays starts to become very relevant. So our programs are free to all learners. And in most parts of the world, particularly for K to 12, there's obviously an expectation that the learner is not going to pay. As the learner gets older and older, the question about should the employer pay, should the government pay or should the learner pay starts to matter. Particularly I think in the parts of the world where there's already a culture of the learner paying, it is a huge advantage because investing in yourself is something that always pays dividends. Particularly in a world that's changing as fast as this. So from the perspective of the learner, building a culture that you are willing to invest in yourself and having the mindset to want to retrain and not expecting somebody else to pay for it for you is critical. I'd say it's up there with global citizenship skills as two of the key parts. If you look at Education 4.0, we put global citizenship skills in that framework because we know that in order to stimulate world peace, we have to be explicit about that being a goal. I think similarly this idea of a mindset shift where a young person believes they have to invest in themselves over and over again in the course of their life and be happily surprised if government subsidizes and be happily surprised if your employer pays, we'll just build a more sustainable model. Would anyone challenge that? Because with the speed at which some of these changes are taking place, is that going to be feasible in all parts of the world? Can we really wait for people to be able to afford that for themselves? There are many parts where they may not be able to. Any other views on that, Jeff? One of the things I think is a little bit tricky as we talk to learners in different parts of the world, if you think about it from an investment decision, including an individual, am I going to take this money I could have used to buy food or buy whatever and spend it on my education, they might not think of it this way, it's an ROI calculation. How much will it cost me and what's my expected return? In a world where your opportunities for employment are very low, the return on investment for education is not obvious and immediate. Maybe your family didn't experience that, maybe your friends don't experience that, it's just not something that's in your world view. The opportunity set is changing very quickly. The ROI is actually going way up with online learning, which is much lower cost to deliver with global opportunities that could be done remotely. The expected ROI is going way up, but I think it takes institutions to help make those opportunities available and to support people in making that decision. I'll just mention there's an interesting sort of payment method which I find kind of exciting, which is like in the UK, the government doesn't necessarily pay directly, they cause their companies to pay a tax, not to train their own people, it goes into community pool because talent is kind of fungible and a lot of employers say, I'm not going to spend money to develop skills and someone's going to get the benefit. So it's a little bit of a collective action problem where unless the government says all of us are going to benefit if all the talent is better, therefore you're all going to pay a tax into a pot that comes from corporate taxes, we will train the labor force, everybody will benefit, no matter whether the talent goes to company A or B or C. That's pretty cool. In Malaysia it's actually one step closer where they say every company must have a payroll tax for their existing employees. So you could say you have to pay the money for your employees or you have to pay the money into a community investment, but it's generally the companies benefiting from the talent that are subsidizing the training of the talent. So 45 minutes goes by way too fast and I do want to take like one question from the audience. You've got a question in the back. Could we give the microphone? I'm Michael Strain with the American Enterprise Institute in Georgetown. Jeff, I have a question for you. I know, and I ask you because I know you're a two-year-old manufacturing worker and your factory shuts down and you're a high school graduate but you don't have any post-secondary education. The models in the U.S. that seem to work are very few and they are where there's a strong relationship between local employers and between community colleges, let's say, or similar training programs and that's where I think a lot of your optimism is spot on, 100% right. I'm concerned about the 90% of locations in the United States where those kinds of relationships don't exist and that 50-year-old manufacturing worker is kind of left out to see without anybody to help him or her. Are you optimistic that Coursera will be able to train that person and then are you optimistic that local businesses will accept that as a valid credential in hiring? I'm pretty optimistic. I think an important part of this was the Infrastructure Act. Here's what we need from governments. We need connectivity and by the way every minister of communications and information technology I see here and every place else all realizes that connectivity is almost the same as power, water, and other basic necessities and I think the U.S. is doing a nice job of laying broadband to communities but I think that's really key. Without that, we're in trouble, right? But with that, for instance, in the state of New York I'll try to make this really fast. The Department of Labor did a workforce development program for every unemployed and underemployed person in the state of New York. They're using these professional certificates. The state university system of New York integrated these certificates into the SUNY system and they have one campus called SUNY Empires 120 on-line degrees. They accept credit for these certificates. The government does a workforce development program for the unemployed people. They actually worked with the Chamber of Commerce in different metro regions in New York to say what skills do you need. They have career centers lightly staffed not with domain experts but with coaches and support so you can walk into a physical place to give you a little bit of career guidance as to what the employers in that region need. The curriculum comes from Coursera through our industry partners. You earn credits, not only a certificate but you earn credits towards a SUNY college degree taking a workforce development program all on-line at any time you want from anywhere you want. There are some interesting combinations I think have promise. Just a quick one to give also another positive perspective on this from an employer perspective. We are the number one worldwide to provide career transition services what we see happening in the US which is quite new as career transition was probably mostly given by large companies these massive layoffs what we see is great traction at the moment on the smaller size the mid-size and the smaller companies that are ready to invest in the way they ensure career transition for the people because they want to show that they care they also want to protect their reputation. They've seen that during COVID when they were firing people when they reopened the doors post COVID there was nobody to come in because of what had happened now we see a lot of traction of companies really wanting to care yes I have to adjust my workforce but to your point I want to make sure that I provide the necessary connections so that people bounce back and it's all about of course when you transition it's all about what you have to learn to be prepared for the future so from an employer perspective things are moving. Thank you Claudia very quickly. Very quickly I totally agree and as a company we are reskilling and to make it a normal process in the company to reskill I have my doubts with the ambition that we have for green and digital transition in Europe there has to be public funding for that and I think it will be a positive return for the governments because there will be less unemployment subsidies and then taxes when people get a job but I think it's a huge funding gap this transition and governments will have to play a part and less inequality. Thank you very much. I do want to take one final round and each of you has like 10 seconds to relay that to our audience if you're one young person today let's say a teenager about to make a decision around whether they go to university whether they go straight into the workforce what should they be learning what's that advice and Jeff you get to go first because you're on the extreme left. I think one of the big benefits is you don't have to decide exactly what you're going to do there's no fatal flawed decisions anymore because there's way more flexibility in how you can navigate your educational pathways and your career pathways so I would say go where your passion takes you be ready to to change at any time if you are curious and adaptive as a learner and if you have good human skills and play well with others you can probably find your career. Aisha for all those young people in Nigeria I would say keep an open mind reskilling upskilling education is relative some things don't translate into some societies and some do but be realistic in following your passion because you know at the end of the day you do need to live and survive. The same advice I give my 19 year old twins which is embrace online education and be self-directed even though it may not excite you now build a habit of being curious and doing it on your own. Thank you Claudia. I would just say be curious. Dennis. Don't expect a linear career path remain IGL be open follow your passion. Thank you very much. So we heard today quite a lot about lifelong learning. We heard about public-public collaboration private-private collaboration and public-private collaboration and maybe one piece of information for all of you one please join the reskilling revolution we are currently working with about 20 governments and more than 350 businesses if you are here in the audience and you want to commit please join the reskilling revolution second we'll be doing a lot of work coming up on exactly one of the core issues that you've all brought up which is the funding model around this who pays and how do we take some of that forward thank you so much thank you to the entire panel and thanks to all of you