 Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this press conference on day two of the annual meeting of the new champions. My name is Oliver Cann. I work in the media team here at the World Economy Forum. Without further ado, and without water glasses, which we're still waiting to have delivered, we're going to keep our Swiss timing and crack on with this wonderful and marvellous press conference. Now, we're here to talk about the future of jobs 2018. Those of you in the room and those of you watching online that remember in 2016, the forum produced a very well-known piece of work called the Future of Jobs 2016. It was the first attempt that we were aware of to try to gauge the size and scale of the challenge of the fourth industrial revolution in terms of the labour force, in terms of the jobs that you and I will be doing in the future. We spent two years coming up with a second piece of research that was even more in depth and we've produced this this week and it's become one of the major conversation topics during this meeting. So, I'm very glad to have four people next to me here who can tell us more about it and of course we're going to have plenty of opportunity for you to ask questions if you can get in between my own questions, of which I have plenty. On my immediate left, Saadia Zahidi is the manager director of the World Economy Forum, head of the Centre for New Economy and Society. Next Saadia, Simon Galpin, managing director of the Bahrain Economic Development Board in Bahrain, of course. Union Park, founder and chief executive DQ Institute based in Singapore, also a young global leader of the World Economy Forum. And thank you very much for joining us as well. Frida Polly, co-founder, chief executive of Pymetrics. Just a little bit of a brief introduction to the four of these. Saadia is going to give you a very brief overview, the highlights of this report. Mr Galpin is going to talk a little bit about the national strategy and how to implement re-skilling. Then we're going to hear from Ms Park a little bit about how we need to upgrade education and we're going to move on to Frida's business, Pymetrics and learn about how AI and machine learning and big data is going to help match those kind of talent crunchers that we're seeing as we try to gear up for the fourth industrial revolution. So Saadia, over to you. Sure, thank you Ali. I think they're both grounds for optimism and a lot of ground for caution as well in terms of the main messages coming out of the report. First we find that out of the current tasks that heads of HR, heads of strategy, CTOs and CEOs of companies can imagine by 2025 it seems very possible that we can automate away about half of those tasks. So 50% of the task hours will be performed by machines and algorithms rather than by people and that number is about 71% in favour of people today. Now that's not to say that there aren't going to be other jobs emerging because we don't actually know how the size of the overall pie will change and when we ask these leaders to tell us what that might look like, what might be the future projections, most of them are imagining that because we'll be able to automate away so many of the existing tasks we'll be able to move into much more higher value add tasks and that is going to generate a lot more jobs. And according to some of the projections that we've been able to put together the growth in jobs, 133 million new jobs across the 20 economies we were looking at is going to more than offset the 75 million that will be declining so overall there will be a net positive. Now the grounds for caution and that is the piece around the fact that companies are expecting that a lot of the growth in future jobs is going to come from these newer tasks. Those newer tasks require a lot of change in terms of the skill sets that people currently have. One set of skills that is going to rise is of course a lot of the technological skills and that's not a surprise but the other piece that's going to rise is creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, active listening, being able to work with others. All of that are incredibly human traits, human skills but we're going to need to use them very differently in our workplaces so that our workplaces have to adapt and workers have to adapt. Thank you so dear. Simon says utopian doesn't it? We can look forward to a future where we create more jobs than we lose and yet our research tells us that corporates themselves are not ready for that and they may not be focusing on those workers that are most at risk. So one would assume therefore that the state needs to step in. What's your strategy in Bahrain? I mean it is a challenge. I mean Bahrain's gone through a major transformation. It was the first place in the GCC to discover oil, the first to run out of oil. So we've moved away from oil and gas so that that's only 20% of our economy but in doing this we've gone through some very rapid transformations building up sectors like financial services, ICT, manufacturing and as we go through this technological transformation into the fourth industrial revolution it's essential that our workforce have the right skills to benefit from some of these technological changes and so we have to do two things. One is we have to remain an open economy and be attractive not just to attract companies but to attract talent from around the world that can add value to the economy. But also we have to make sure that the workforce in Bahrain is working in the private sector, have the right skills to really access some of these employment opportunities. So we work very closely with big companies, companies like Huawei who partner up with universities to communicate some of the skill gaps and make sure that universities and polytechnics provide the right courses for our graduates so that they can get into the ICT workforce but also trying to transform some of the graduates that have maybe a business degree to ensure that they have short term training through providers like Udacity that are again going to be more relevant. And then finally we have a big company, Amazon Web Services which has really transformed the Bahrain economy by putting one of their first major data regions in Bahrain and in conjunction with doing that, they've introduced an AWS Educate Programme and even though Bahrain is very small, we had 2,500 applications for young people going into that program to be retrained and upskilled in cloud technology which is actually faster than you would see in China or some much, much larger economies. So we're taking it very seriously at the EDB but we recognise we have to do this in partnership with corporates. And just on that point, I believe the data we have in our report is something like just under half of the company from the wrong side yet and the half of companies responded, said that they were prepared to reskill but much less than that was for the at risk workers and most of the focus was on the highly skilled. Does that resonate with your experience? Yeah, I mean it's not just the very highly skilled it's actually giving people the more practical skills that can get into the workforce. So basic coding and so on is something that's really in demand but also the softer skills that you mentioned in the introduction making sure people have the right interpersonal skills to work in a service economy as well. So Yu-Yun Park, this is predicated on the march of technology but of course it goes back to humans and as we've been hearing it's all about the people can we get the people to make these benefits and these opportunities become real. How do we need to upgrade education? First of all, congratulations on this beautiful report. There's lots of great points that education sector have to take a heat on. What is the most common question in education sector now is how to prepare our children for their future jobs in order to compete with AI. Do you like this question? Actually, I want to challenge this to frame. Let's compare with the horse and people. You know, a horse is faster than people, right? But we are not competing them against horse in running skills. We actually ride horse, not compete with horse. I think the same analogy has to apply to now education sector as Sadia mentioned. It is important for us to equip children to a right skills. They can ride and manage AI. So it is important for us to understand AI as a more of an extended intelligence rather than artificial intelligence to compete against children rather how we can help children to have the right skills to augment this AI to actually produce the better efficiency and productivity in the workforce. So in order to do that, just Sadia beautifully mentioned and also it was mentioned, technical skill is important but that is not the end of the game. I think the three things are very important which has been identified by the OECD future learning framework by 2030. The first is the confidence. Confident identity as the master of technology rather than the slave or competitors of the technology that requires agility as well as the agency of the students but at the same time we want to reframe the digital skills into digital intelligence which is more comprehensive that combines not just about technical skills higher order thinking, critical thinking and creativity and others but lastly more importantly about ethics and wisdom unless we have this ethical attitude along the students. It is very difficult for us to foster this skill of collaborative thinking as well as many other issues that we have to confront of. Thank you very much. Frida, you work with businesses and you're trying to get them to solve that hiring puzzle. It's a refrain we've all become used to the fact that there is grinding on employment in the world and yet there's a terrible shortage of skills in the right way. What are your experiences in how much this has been grasped by corporas and how they're able to use technology to help solve this challenge? Sure. I think that's a great question Oliver. What we see certainly for companies that are really embracing innovation is that they see AI and new ways of thinking about people as a way to solve these problems rather than augmenting them. So I think we're all in agreement here that the jobs of the future are going to change and some of those jobs will require a more analytic framework in terms of data science engineering and some of these jobs may require a more collaborative and pathic creative framework. Now this is a very simple juxtaposition but I think we would all argue common sensically that certain people have greater strengths and weaknesses in one or more of those areas. So we can use technology to really understand humans better in terms of their strengths and weaknesses because these jobs evolve really match them to what their inherent aptitudes suit them best to. And this can be done, I think, both at the high potential level. Oliver, you mentioned that I think it's 41% are really interested in retraining their high potential but I was actually struck by the fact that 33%, which isn't that much less than 41, actually want to reskill their most vulnerable populations and that's what we see in the companies that we work with. Accenture, for example, has a mission to essentially take workers that are currently at threat of automation and give them the reskilling programs that they need to up-level their jobs. And in order to do that, they're using Pymetrix technology to understand of all of that larger set of at-risk workers what jobs of the future would they be best suited for. And I think that's where technology can really help in terms of using AI to do that type of more precise matching. It's a really heartwarming example you gave and it's great that there's a business case for reskilling these workers. Is that applicable across all industries? Is this specific, this is a professional services company we're talking about? I don't think so. I mean, I think that, you know, again, if you tap into what somebody's inherent strengths are, you can retrain them into jobs that they didn't know that they were well suited for, right? Take me, I'm an English major, turned neuroscientist, turned entrepreneur, right? There's nothing in my CV that would have predicted that trajectory, but I think that it taps certain inherent strengths that I have and I was able to reskill myself. And I think that all humans have the potential to reskill into new occupations. It's really just about tapping into the inherent traits that make them strong in certain domains versus others. Perfect point to pause and see how many people want to ask questions. Can you please give me a show of hands? Anyone wants to ask a question? Lady in the front row to get things started. Can you remind us where you're from, please? Give us also your name before you ask your question. Indeed. I'm Naveet McMahon and I'm managing partner for China Money Network. I have a question. Just because people today can't... ...can't think of a new job of tomorrow, I'd like to ask a canny question to all the panellists to just imagine which job or aid role that they would say could be a future job for a human. Well, Sally, we did a bit of work on reskilling. The reskilling revolution, I believe it was called, which looked into this very subject. Well, there's actually a lot of information out there which is starting to imagine where growth will come from, where job growth will come from. So there are very specific roles that are highlighted throughout the report that are going to be growing in the future. What's interesting about that is that while some of them are very specialized around types of technology, somebody who's a specialist on AI, somebody who's a specialist on machine learning, somebody who's a specialist on, you know, you name it, at the same time there is going to be a huge rise in those people who can help coordinate others and who can work with other humans, who can provide better specialist kind of sales functions, who can provide HR training, who can provide learning coordinators. So there's a rise also of those type of roles. But overall, more structurally, in a lot of developed and emerging markets, there's going to be a huge growth in the care sector. There's going to be a huge growth in the education sector, huge growth in the green energy sector. So there are a lot of sectors as a whole that are going to be growing and which need not be limited by what specific technological skills you have, but really have that ability to marry technology with the ability to deliver a good service to somebody else. So I think, again, this combination of very digital and human skills together is what's going to grow these sectors in the future. And if I might actually just take a stab at answering a question, it's a little different, but, you know, if you think about a UX UI designer, that's not a role that was around, you know, five to ten years ago. And for example, there are a lot of people with PhDs like myself who, a PhD in anthropology, might be a great training ground for a UX UI designer, right, because they're studying human behavior. Now those two things might never have been put together previous to five years ago. But I think those are the types of examples we're going to see more and more of where somebody with a, you know, sort of obscure degree is now matching to or obscure skill set of any kind is now matching to a role that, you know, five years ago didn't exist. Can I add? Well, it is also already well-known fact that, you know, the machine can predict and diagnose better than doctors. So when they have the two different comparisons, if they have a two different diagnosis, 70% of chance that the machines actually do better than doctors. So it is quite interesting to see that who's responsible, you know, when doctors overwrite the decision of machines, then who's going to be responsible for the, you know, ill-diagnosed result. So what was actually now is talking about is how we can utilize this machine as a validation of the doctors. So doctors' role is no longer, may not be in future is about diagnostics. It's more about using, he looked at older, actually diagnostic tools and then see, hey, you know, this is my opinion and added opinions and facilitating and just like to describe, so some new area of doctor function can be developed, be evolved. So I think it's more about what kind of sector or what kind of job, you know, what kind of function that the people can do better job using the AI. And if I can add, I mean, I think AI is going to be a great neighbour, a great tool, but at the end of the day, aren't people going to crave some sort of human contact? And so, you know, you're not going to completely do away with it. They're going to get sick of always talking to a chat bot. And so, you know, anything that, people that have the right interpersonal skills, I think are always going to be in demand. And we talk a lot about technology, but creativity, creative industries, this is much more difficult to truly replicate in an AI environment. So I think those two areas, they're still room for humans to be involved and for job opportunities. Next question. I'll pitch one in just to give you time to collect your thoughts. Sadiw, let's go back to 2016. I've been doing a lot of work since then. The overriding headline in 2016 was one of, was one of pessimism, I believe, is fair. We came out with a headline that we believe five million jobs will be lost in five years. That was a smaller sample, admittedly. But there's a great difference here. Whilst you're not optimistic, you're admitting that there is grounds for optimism there. So what has happened in those two years that gives us a better picture, a more complete picture of the unfolding job landscape? A lot of what has happened is that essentially the easier to integrate technologies that could basically automate away the person and save costs in terms of labour have already been put in place. So a lot of those gains have already been made by companies. Now they're having to think about how do we differentiate our products and services? How do we actually move on to the next wave of creativity and dynamism? That requires much more people. I think that we're seeing that across the board, across the 12 industry sectors, across the 20 economies we covered. That's the change you're starting to see. I do want to pick up on the other piece you said about reskilling. So I find that 30% that are planning to reskill their most at-risk workers, I find that quite low considering how much needs to happen, how much needs to change. So if that's the case, that means somebody else has to take on part of this. Now to empathise with the companies, it is almost impossible for most companies to reskill their entire workforce because of the costs involved. But what they can be doing and what's starting to happen is a lot more collaboration between companies to lower the costs and to gain some efficiency in some of that reskilling and upskilling. That's a model that increasingly lots of different industries are starting to use, especially in the same geographic area. So there is some possibility of essentially collaborating for the first time on talent instead of competing for talent. I would also argue that this idea that it's very expensive to retrain and is actually, to some extent, we don't really know. Because there's this company called Catellite that basically takes former gas station workers and fast food service people and trains them to be engineers. Now granted, it's not an overnight process. But if that type of transformation can happen, I would argue that actually getting rid of a whole bunch of your workforce just to rehire them after spending a lot of money to find these highly specialized workers that indeed you could probably just manage that process in-house. I think the economics don't necessarily argue for it being any less expensive to do a lot more retraining of your workforce than to just think you're going to be able to find a supply of talent out in the applicant pool. Simon, it's a valid point, as you say. 30% are planning to reskill the vulnerable workers to 70 arcs. It's a sizable portion that believers know of business. Or they haven't even thought about it yet. So give me some ideas and some insight into them at the practical level. How the interface of business and the public sector, how that actually works, how that collaboration is unfolding. We have an employment fund, which is a sister organization for us called Temkin, and they incentivize employers to, a, give jobs to bucranians, but b, to provide them with the right training to give them the right skills. So they'll cover salary costs for fresh graduates. They'll cover a sizable percentage of training costs, even if it's about sending those graduates overseas to be trained in that company's home economy. And that's quite a good way to go about it. But actually you've got to do with things on a number of different fronts. You've got to start at the basic education level. A big challenge for us in bucrania is we have a very high percentage of our high school cohort going on to university education, but they nearly always study almost the same thing, which is business studies, and not all of them have the right skills to go into the digital economy. So providing a mechanism for those graduates to train or retrain very quickly is a quick fix for us. But fundamentally we have to change the university systems as well and make sure that we're offering the right types of degrees. Maybe you could talk about that being involved in education as well. How do we... It's an interesting point you made freedom about. An anthropologist could be a great UX designer and who would have thought about that? Is it okay to have generalist educations or do we need to get much more prescriptive at an earlier level? Well, just to say describe that, we don't even know what's going to be next UX UI designer. So it is important for us to actually focus on the fundamentals. And one thing I wanted to actually bring it up is about the new learning framework that we are now discussing. So a previous goal of education was to actually bring the job force. The economic growth is the fundamental goal for the education, national education. But now the new paradigm of thinking is that the goal of education should be individual societal well-being rather than just economic growth. So when we have the change of thinking and change of paradigm when we think about education, so it is not just about bringing the job forces. If we want to actually see it's more holistic about how to actually bring the whole being as a person who has agency who can adapt to the difficult environment. So I think that is a more fundamental education that we have to focus rather than just one or two technical skills. I was just one more data point that I would just like to highlight from this report. We've calculated 101 days of re-skilling as required by everybody in the next four years by 2022, I believe. On average. On average. That can look very different depending on what role you're in. That's not that bad. Three months in four years. Not bad, but also quite a sizable chunk and I wonder if everybody is acquired a kind of understanding of that scale of that challenge. This is your last chance to ask a question before I close this session. OK. So we're just going to start here. I'm going to ask you this question because you don't produce these reports as a media man, I wish you did more often, but you go away and you actually work with these reports rather than produce a new piece of research every six months or every year. What are we going to be seeing next in terms of what I can work for in this space? Sure. There are four areas that we're trying to work in. One, help companies define what their augmentation strategy needs to be. So if it's true that instead of automation we can move towards augmentation, what does that look like? How do we get companies to think about it? A second aspect is having that intra-industry collaboration. We really do believe that if industries are working together in finding that next pipeline of talent and helping displaced workers be re-skilled, it's more efficient for everybody and creates a much greater pool of talent for those companies and much better outcomes for workers. Third, working with governments to define what does modern active labour market policy look like? What's the role of governments in this? There are some displaced workers who will not get re-skilled on the job and what happens to them? How do we give them income security? How do we ensure that they actually have the space and the time to be able to find that next role, to be able to find the education for that next role, the re-skilling for that next role and that's where governments will need to step up whether it's in the form of job centres or other ways. And then finally the last aspect is we're not even always talking the same language when it comes to skills and so actually help define a common skills taxonomy that everyone can use, that HR leaders can use, that tech companies can use and that workers themselves can use to understand what is the type of skill they need to acquire and how they get credentialed for it. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for joining us here my friends and thank you for watching us live online at weforum.org. Your session is now over.