 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for being here for this press conference. We're going to speak about a very important topic in the world, but also specifically for this region. We're going to have an in-depth look at the state of talent in the Arab world. And we have a distinguished panel here who are experts and who have done a report and they will tell us what is the situation in the region and they will give us their insight and then you will have the opportunity to ask some questions. So I have next to me Selim Ede, who's the head of policy and government relations Middle Eastern North Africa at Google. We have then in the middle here of our panel Patricia McCall, who is the executive director for the center of economic growth at INSEAD. And last but not least Bruno Lovain, who is the executive director of the European Competitiveness Initiative at INSEAD also. I'm going to start with Bruno, actually, to give us the key findings of the report. Thank you very much. Good morning everybody, or good afternoon rather. The report we've been presenting here at the Dead Sea Meeting of the World Economic Forum is the most recent baby of a series of production. Basically we produce every year the Global Talent Competitiveness Index, which we launch in Davos. So typically in January you have the global report that ranks 118 countries in terms of their talent competitiveness. The idea behind it is that talent, that is human capital, is what conditions countries ability to compete on the global scene, their capability to innovate and the capability to benefit in particular from technological change. Without the right kind of skills, without the right kind of talents, the benefits of technology driven, data driven globalization may be lost to large parts of the world. That's the background and why we do this exercise every year. The MENA region, Middle East North Africa region, is the only region for which we have a regional report. So we believe very much that this is the part of the world where things will happen, have started to happen, and maybe an example for the rest of the world. There are specific difficulties, there are specific challenges and specific opportunities in particular due to demography, the youth of populations in the Middle East regions and Arab countries that makes it a very, very important target for our own research and a very powerful example for the rest of the world. That's again the broad picture and why we are launching this report here today. Just a very short sentence about the rankings, because this is what attracts press and we know it from experience, we insist on saying that the rankings are only the tip of the iceberg and the proof of the usefulness of this report is in action. That is whether governments, private businesses, academia, individuals use this report to actually change their behavior and enhance their talent competitiveness on the global scene. Right now in the region we have ranked the 12 countries for which we had data in the region and we have at the very top the United Arab Emirates and Qatar who are leading the pack number one and number two in the region and they are followed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait. Jordan is number six in that ranking of 12, which reflects the ranking of Jordan in the overall exercise since Jordan is number 58 out of the 118 countries. So it's quite symptomatic that whatever number you take you divide it by two and that's the ranking of Jordan. So maybe Jordan likes to be on the average not to be noticeable but will have time in the discussion to come back to some of the specifics of Jordan as a country in this region and why it is so much of an example for many other countries. I think a very important part is technology. So Salim, can you tell us a little bit what role technology plays? Certainly. So we asked ourselves the question can the mean region catch up and the answer came back as we are all optimists. Yes it is possible as long as we use technology as a game changer and as you know this audience knows this very well that technology can change things for the better. So how can this happen in the mean region? Remember the mean is youth rich in terms of 60% of the people in mean are under 25 and that is a source of talent. And the question then how to turn this talent into competitive talent and we discovered through the study that there is a confusion people make a confusion between education and talent competitiveness. So talent competitiveness is more than education and technology can help at least three levels on the classical demand side which is demand for talent and here we strongly believe that to digitize the economy meaning with the youth at the core meaning for example 18% of the SMEs are present on the internet in the UAE which is one of the most advanced it's number one country in the ranking compared to 60% in the EU so there is a lot to catch up with and you need to digitize the economy with the SME being the main driver. That is from a demand point of view. Now technology there are new technologies that are coming like machine learning and artificial intelligence augmented reality virtual reality all these will contribute greatly as well to the demand side. On the supply side this is where the confusion happens between education and talent competitiveness preparing people to be competitive you need education plus something else. So talent competitiveness is more than education and the report really talks a lot about the more part and how technology can empower it. Basically all the experts will tell you that blended learning meaning mixing online plus instructional training plus on-the-job training is critical this is the way forward. Now the only way to achieve it is through extensive use of technology as a game changer in the blended learning experience. Also here augmented reality and machine learning and artificial intelligence can help. The last element is the intermediary space between demand and supplies what we like to call the poor cousin not enough emphasis is given on this yet we see the role of the platforms globally how they are creating the right connections between the demand and the supply and actually creating opportunities and this is extremely important we can there are many great examples here in the minor region about how these platforms are changing the game and they are technology platforms and one very important point as well is that here again machine learning and artificial intelligence is actually accelerating the intermediary space and making it more far more effective last but not least between the two you have the networks and the connectivity and throughout this these two days here everyone talked about connectivity so the basic element of it keeping it simple is they need you need to provide the young people with increased level of connectivity actually high quality internet for all anywhere any place their choice the choice of the youth and that will be in a key element to unlock the potential of the region. Thank you very much Patricia you have some dimensions also to add from the report sure so so one of the things that we also focused on as Salim alluded to is that talent exists in the ecosystem that is beyond education and and lifelong learning and executive education and so one of the aspects of the report focuses on the entire ecosystem around private sector development and how do we encourage economic reform and investment climate reform so there's four areas that I wanted to highlight the first is the labor market as we're all aware that about 30% region wide of the employed workforce is in the public sector versus 10% globally so one of the challenges is how do we move especially the youths out of the public sector and into the private sector where they can they can be more competitive and and more jobs can be created in the SME sector so that's one of the challenges we highlight the other is on education we've spoken a lot about this in terms of how does the private sector regional corporations partner with the governments and the ministries of education and the universities there needs to be collaborative partnership where companies are helping the universities design their curriculums so that they are teaching the youths of the region the skills that they need when they graduate to go into the workforce so that there's a host of recommendations in the report about not just lifelong learning but how to how to to engage more with education both K through 12 and universities I would also highlight the legal framework so so in terms of talent competitiveness there needs to be a competitive environment for job creation so we still need to look at labor market flexibility hiring and firing bankruptcy laws IP laws things that create a vibrant private sector so there can be demand for the skills that the youths are developing and then lastly I'll point to the entrepreneurship ecosystem we do if you look at the variables for each of the countries we do look at things such as starting a business how easy is it to get access to finance research patents all of the areas around developing entrepreneurs and how how we can facilitate better growth within not just SMEs but young entrepreneurs and those opportunities for the youth there's several other issues that we talk about in the report about the private sector role and I think it's important to make sure that this talent competitiveness is both a government but also a private sector issue thank you very much Patricia thank you to all the panelists we have now time for questions if you if you want to ask a question please introduce yourself and and to who you want to address the question we have about 10 to 15 minutes do we have a immediate question here here in the panel yes please please wait for the microphone okay my name is Lara Abdul Malik I work for Pan Arab Business magazine Sadu Aman my question is why did why did you Google decide to do this research and how does that bring back either to the business or your efforts in the MENA region thank you thank you Lara great question so why we're here is because this report has unique aspects first of all you know in the Middle East we we all have opinions we come to the table and we discuss at length and it's always fascinating and it's good to come to result so this report is data rich it has a lot of data if you go through it and when data comes to a meeting actually it speaks for itself and hopefully people will start a constructive conversation that will lead somewhere I give you an example a personal one you know I'm originally from Lebanon as you know and Lebanon ranks number eight in this which is which is difficult to accept but I have to look at the reality and then start the conversation hopefully that will lead to an improvement of the situation the other aspect of that is that is that this is actually we mentioned that talent is more than education and and really really this this report puts NFS also on youth and youth is the most valuable resource and and and actually it will will transform things that now how does it link to what we're doing and this is your question is that we are we are engaged in across the MENA region in building digital skills at various levels I'll just give you a couple of examples like in Egypt we've launched the mobile application launching pad mal with abbreviation for mal and we were there in last in March and 1300 young people if you can see the energy in the room actually as you know mobile application is one of the best jobs paid jobs in the US it's one example the other example we're building digital literacy in in Saudi Arabia and this helping kids to be safer on the internet a third one is digital skills in in in Abu Dhabi we were we sort of trained so far 50 000 the aim is to train 250 000 young people on on coding so this is the new literacy the new literacy of the 21st century thank you very much and and just made me to remind you that the report is now launched so you you will be able to consult it there's a few copies here and you can get a e-copy from from our colleagues who are here in the room so we had two other questions maybe can we start in the front um yes uh jinnan shakair from uh yarmouk press and yarmouk university you said talent is more than just education but we can't embrace talent if we don't improve education so how do you see improving education considering the lack of um potentials in our uh especially public sectors and university thank you thank you very much excellent question again one should not make a confusion between education and formal education clearly formal education remains extremely important you need to go through basic skills to acquiring the ability to read write and now code which we believe is a fundamental basic capability that needs to be developed very early that's the formal education part but we are not living anymore in a world where the first part of your life was about getting an education and the second part was about working this is a lifelong type of education that we are looking forward to and each and every one of us whatever our age whatever our gender will need to continuously upskill so we need to learn continuously this is where education is it's far beyond formal education in the talent index we distinguish three parts in what we call talent competitiveness the first one is to grow talent which is largely education and not just formal education as i just said the second one is attracting talent because not every country has the ability nor the will to develop worldwide universities that will attract people from all over the world to get an education this is still a very big advantage of the us of some european economies it will not change overnight but there is a possibility to have local people trained outside and come back and contribute and this has to do with attracting or re attracting talent and the last one which must not be neglected and very often is the most important is how to retain talent in the gcc we can think of many economies which have been very efficient at attracting talent but this has this has been high caliber talent coming for two three years getting some money and going back to live where the family elsewhere how do you encourage these people to set routes to come with their family to live there and contribute to the growth and the competitiveness of the economy so growing attracting and retaining are the three pillars to be considered and education is clearly a very important part but as you mentioned it's not going to be efficient if it's not considered in the overall exercise and what patricia just mentioned about the role of the private sector gives a particular role to business school and of course i'm pleading for my own chapel here uh because the uh in seattle is about that but what we are trying to do is to show that talent needs to be developed across sectors that you're not condemned to work all your life in the public sector or all your life in the private sector and encouraging segways and channeling people between one and the other is critically important thank you very much and we had another question unless you salem do you want to add i just wanted to add something that would please we know is that you know he has a cartesian mind so it's we say talent competitiveness is education is necessary but not sufficient right and from a mathematical way of of saying so so that extra thing is is that ecosystem that clearly was articulated if you're in the formula to illustrate what we we share as a passion in common um about formal education any formal education think of the difference between science and technology okay and we are fond of saying science is what a grandmother can teach a granddaughter and technology is the other way around okay and this summarizes the way we should look at education thank you so we had a second question my name is hello i'm from a distur daily newspaper i want to ask you about jordan ranking in the index how can jordan how do you evaluate the performance of jordan and how can it develop regarding regarding partnership between private and public sectors yeah this is typically the kind of questions we hope to get into through this report we want to encourage countries to bring the findings in their own national context so i can only be very brief here but that's a discussion i'd be very happy to to pursue later on out of the three pillars i mentioned grow attract and retain the weakness of jordan is in growth okay as it is for many countries in the region it is the ability to train people in both vocational skills and what we call global knowledge skills at home the the most talented people students have to go abroad get an education and then there's no guarantee that they would come back a number of them is still attracted to public sector jobs which puts additional pressure on the private sector but jordan being a small economy also has the agility that bigger economies in the region don't have so we see many examples whereby sometimes pushed by geography or pushed by demography or pushed by politics in the in the region jordan has proved that innovation is part of the mantra the high number of refugees for instance creates additional pressure on the economy and creates some model behavior for many countries not just in the region but in the world i know that in my own part of the world in europe we look very much at what jordan is doing about refugees because there is pressure on the migration side overall as i mentioned before jordan is in the average that is it's right in the middle of the ranking globally and right in the middle of the ranking in the in the region which means that there is a lot of room for improvement in particular on the data front if you look at the report you will see that there's a number of variables for which the the data for jordan is not available and i believe that if a statistical effort were made actually the ranking would go up there's a lot of good data that we don't we don't track but that's just one one example i think the basic message we want to push about talent competitiveness is that those who have succeeded have been open economies and jordan is clearly one example of an open economy in the region patricia maybe something on the recommendation well there's one thing i just wanted to mention and um i may ask bruno to to expand on it is that for all the countries in the region when you look at the the relative to their income level when we when we compare how are they doing on talent competitiveness for all of them there's room for them to to move up to the mean in terms of there's a great opportunity for them to spend their funding throughout the whole spectrum of talent um more efficiently and um more effectively do you want to comment on that because i think it's an important point the uh thank you patricia it is indeed a critical point if you look at page uh got which page somewhere in the report you will see a big bubble chart and there's a line going in the middle and the line is actually uh where your performance is expected to be uh if it were dictated by your level of wealth in in other in other words if your country is a rich country let's take the united arab Emirates which has a high income per capita you would expect the talent performance to be that high if you are Yemen or Algeria in the same region you would expect the talent performance to be lower for obvious reasons related to capital endowment universities etc so if you're a country below that line it means there is room for improvement there clearly things that can be done better that should push the ranking higher and one thing which we see in the whole region is that all countries the 12 countries are below the line okay and that does us that probably with little effort but put in the right place the improvement could be quite spectacular Jordan is one of the countries fairly close to that line so it shows that it is one country in which the tools at hand have been used better than in other parts of the other region but it still uh raises the issue of what is the path for progress what can be improved and climate for business for instance uh can be improved on the regulatory side is considered fairly stable for foreign investors so Jordan will keep attracting foreign investors but there's a number of things in terms of uh you know how much time it's spare is uh requires to hire or fire somebody how much time it takes to implement a contract all these type of things which have nothing to do with neither technology nor talent management per se may improve the overall performance tell me one yeah i just want to add one thing because you mentioned uh private public partnerships i think there is something uh another p which is missing here it's private public people partnerships so you have consumers today who have a with the with the with a lot of power you know newfound power they are they are they are mobile uh working walking uh eating sleeping data generating creatures and this data is rich and i think in jordan you have a very rich uh human uh capital uh in terms of individuals and if you engage them more as users in into this partnership you'll be surprised what can be there now there is one thing on the critical path of engaging more the consumers it's the connectivity and therefore you know i would really encourage to have uh in that intermediary space that we talked about uh uh internet for all uh of high quality and you'd be surprised what can come out of it and the other thing is uh you know when we say in the intermediary space she has a labor market we say digitize the labor market but please we beg you don't digitize the problems so it is an opportunity to actually rethink the processes make them simpler because you know data natives they love that they they they'll be able to embrace it and embrace disruption and change for the better uh and jordan is really ready to to do that and i would even add the rest of the region is very much ready and this is why going back to your question this is why we're we're here because we're optimistic about the future and we had actually an internet for all press conference earlier today so um we did talk also about this topic here the world economic forum and we have actually reached the the end of the press conference and since we started late um is there any last question you could maybe do a quick answer yes please here hi michael fahey from the national newspaper um there was one there were a couple of figures in the report interested beyond the level of people outside of the workforce 44 outside of the gcc and 64 within the gcc i believe that's mainly because of uh the lack of women in the workforce uh i just wanted to know how you go about improving that and how do you go about improving the attractiveness of private sector jobs in gcc countries where there are so many expats okay who would like to uh again a critical and powerful question that the the last minute of the exercise so we have to be very very short but this is exactly the the type of issue that is behind this report this is why we have this report there is an obvious problem there is a youth bulge um the generation y coming which is an asset for the region and a huge gap in terms of employment so and you you quoted the uh the figures so it's time for action uh what is missing what is missing is the um uh moving away from an entitlement mentality which makes it a tradition to look for jobs in the public sector jobs in the public sector should be encouraged it should be attractive it should not be at the detriment of private sector initiatives um identifying heroes role models young people will start with selen mentioned earlier you know an app that's become successful everybody wants to use and help all this success show that it can happen that that will be a powerful magnet for talent in the in the region and the third one on the gender side uh we see a number of situations around the world and no region is an exception in europe for instance until the end of secondary studies girls are performing better than boys in terms of STEM science technology and mathematics and yet you look at engineers you look at the it sector the proportion of male is much higher than that the female what is going on there is somewhere a perception that these careers are not rewarding they are not socially uh rewarded for for women this is a cultural issue that can be uh that can be addressed and Jordan is one of the countries in which we see uh a number of positive results in that area but the most important is the point that both uh Patricia and selen mentioned before this is a young region uh so youth unemployment is the key issue to be to be addressed and we talk about generation x and generation y i still believe that you know people why why why the letter y i think the answer is this in this region uh generation y is generation yellow uh i'll just can i add a quick point to that just i think i think we're moving towards it because if you look at let's say gcc budgets they they're not going to be able to sustain a huge public sector workforce for the next 10 years giving the prices of oil so we've already started to see some some freezes in saudi in terms of public sector salaries but it's still about 70 more pay in the public sector versus the private sector and there needs to be this discussion between the public and private sector about how to bring that equilibrium down i would also say just one quick thing on the private sector side i think we also have to put the onus on the private sector as well to be more proactive and hiring nationals and and um and expats that may be in in the country in things like internships so historically private sectors rarely offer internships because they see it as too costly and too time-consuming um and that that attitude also has to change because in other markets it's very traditional that you you're entering into some private sector companies is through internships while you're still at university and those are almost non-existent here tell him anything you would like to ask before we close yes because i think it's it's uh you asked specifically about the gcc and of course the the classical answer would be you make it less attractive to work in the in the public sector but what if we do something different and uh if you provide a broadband massive broadband to everyone at the youth we say that this region is growing younger so by the day and they will astonish you what they can do we we know that for instance we have youtube creators who left their day job to actually be full time doing youtube creation and this is a brave new word brand new opportunities where actually equal men and women are participating there i'd also give you an example not from from google but actually i heard here the kareem story in in Saudi Arabia they provided a platform to to to help as you know transport and then all of a sudden they create 250 000 jobs and 70 000 of them are in the gcc in Saudi Arabia they are Saudis so this was like it was unheard of a few years ago and that's i would say the the the transformational power when you put technology easy to use uh together uh of high quality if if you put it in in touch with with use then things things extraordinary things can happen and i remind you that the world can work from did um select 100 startups that we featured here at the summit so i think that's also part of of that whole story so thank you very much to our distinguished panels today thank you for coming here to this press conference and and uh hope you have a nice end of the meeting thank you thank you thank you