 Hello and a very, very warm welcome to this discussion, which is a key part of the World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Summit. My name is Sally Bundalk and I'm going to be steering you through this session and it's absolutely jam-packed. We've got some fantastic contributors all lined up to share their skills and expertise. Just to tell you, and you can see them all there and I'll introduce you to them in just a moment, but just to tell you a little bit about me, I work for BBC News as you can see and if you are an early riser, you're a peeing time and I do appreciate you all connecting from all over the world, but you'll catch my programme on BBC World News. It's one hour, it's live, it's packed with all the news, latest news business and sport and when I say early hours for me, it means my alarm this morning went off at 1.50am and I was in the newsroom in London at 3am and I know pretty shocking but hey, makeup covers all the issues and my area of specialism is business and finance and so the discussion that we're going to have now this afternoon has been a key talking point I have to say with many of the chief executives, politicians and leaders that I've been interviewing in recent weeks on BBC World News, we're talking about the world of work, the dramatic changes the global pandemic has forced, if you collide that with climate change and also bring in the disruption of automation, you've got what many would argue is a triple whammy which whether we like it or not is transforming the world of work. So today, as you just saw there, we have a great set of panellists who are going to share their thoughts and expertise and also I just want to mention that this discussion we're having, this first part is an open discussion so what that means is we would love to hear from you so please get involved via the chat messaging app at the section at the bottom, you hit the button, send us your questions and your thoughts and your comments and we'll bring them through into the discussion as well and also do share far and wide on social media, the fact that we are having this conversation, some of the key points that are made, the hashtag to use is SDIS 21 so that's all to come but as you can see we have got three fantastic panellists who are waiting to share their expertise so we've got Robert Moritz who is the chairman of PWC who I must admit I have interviewed many times in the early hours on a cold balcony in Davos at the World Economic Forum and of course his his remit is well and truly overflowing at PWC but also he's very actively involved with WEF which includes initiatives to do with the future of work and education so Bob Great's happy with us this afternoon we've also got Dan Rosenswig who is president and chief executive of the company Czech this is a student services company based in California I hope I've got that right Dan he's also an investor in many Silicon Valley companies as well and is involved in several initiative initiatives that encourage mentoring and workplace equality so Dan great to have you on board and we have Soonju Gug who is joining us from Singapore it's late in the evening for Soonju she is chief skills officer and chief research officer at the skills future in Singapore she leads a team of jobs skills analysts data scientists and futurists to identify global trends that impact business jobs and skills so we're going to have a discussion now for a period of time as I've mentioned it's an open discussion this will be recorded and available later as well for you to watch again or to spread far and wide but just to mention after this we've got a very interactive phase two of this session where we'll all be set moved into breakout rooms and during that session that's more of a private discussion where Chatham house rules will apply but for now let's begin with the panel conversation and as I said we really want to hear from you those of you who tune in from all over we want to get your comments and your questions in so do get them sent to us so first of all Bob if I start with you and we begin with from your perspective what are the most promising approaches for upskilling and by that we can look at you know post pandemic activity what's going going on across different industries where have you seen promising approaches to that challenge Kelly thanks first for moderating the conversation and I'm thrilled to be doing this not in the frigate zone of Davos Switzerland in the early part of every calendar year but coming back to your question first let's start with a statement the world of work has to work better for everybody and what the last 18 months has definitely demonstrated is that we've got to evolve and collectively work across the entire ecosystem to make it actually work better for everybody on a more inclusive basis so what are the things that we see as promising first there's a hell of a lot more awareness the divisiveness has come in terms of the haves and have nots becomes painfully obvious second the ability to see that it is possible to change change the way we do work from an in-office approach to a hybrid approach to a totally digital approach shows it is possible to change the way we think about things so that's another positive that's come through with that though obviously is the challenge of covid right we've got a really crowded agenda now as people think about what are the various challenges they've got to deal with so it really requires sort of three fundamental things first the time and attention of government business community leaders and educators coming together collectively to work this across the entire ecosystem when we see that happen in various countries and we'll talk about Singapore in a few seconds with the rest of the panel there's great examples where business and government come together very well the second part i would say where we see things working really well is when we bring our youth into the equation india is a great example that we're part of an organization called generation unlimited and that case is an offshoot for unicef we're focused on four things one is connectivity to make sure people have access second is the quality and content of the education that goes to the curriculum that's being provided which we know when you look at those two things it's been challenging in the world at the lower level of education and the higher level of education third is the issue of entrepreneurship making sure we actually have jobs that our skills can be used against in the developing part of the world's right now that's actually not as big of a challenge in the developing parts of the world it is a big challenge so making sure we've got to focus on entrepreneurship and the changing way work will be done is going to be important and last but not least is bringing youth to the equation we actually have youth champions in india and the genu organization where they're actually the ones driving the change they're activating it bringing it to life working with educators business and government so the combination all those things silly is super important to get to the positive outcome we're looking for which goes to how do we have the impact on the most peaceful possible to get them skilled for the work of the future whatever that may be looking like and we cannot predict what it's going to look like so agility is really important in this part of this process okay super thank you bob soon do you're nodding away there um what are you seeing doing in singapore that would you know show us examples of promising approaches to upskilling thank you bob for the sharing and thank you sadly for the question can you hear me yeah we can loud and clear okay yeah great um i would say that looking at the questions i will caution us not to get distracted by the word post-covid and we can't kind of think that we're going back to the typical normal business as usual i would say that the the post-covid actually give us a great opportunity in fact we have seen a lot of innovation as bob mentioned a lot of the organization has done away with processes that require human human human to perform and they've automated that and and they have reduced that the kind of labor dependent the dependence to do work processes and and the automation is really really exciting so i thought we when we look at the post-covid uh race industry across industry rescaling we should always have that uh beyond recovery to the old to a more transformative future and to seize the opportunity to make sure that whatever we we rescale is to is for the future future the economy where the there is sustainable growth so i thought that is a very important point for me to put across not to go back to the old but to really support the rescaling for the future and to do that to rescale rescaling for the future economy i think we really need to think through what are the kind of where are the feasible and reasonable jobs allow people to pivot from a sunset industry to sunrise industry and that that requires a lot of coordination and planning um from with that in the industry with the businesses we treat those as a association chamber and with a university polytechnic all the education is still coming together and and some of the workforce intermediary and that part is really important because we cannot have good policy without good implementation so i think that is key and i think that Lee is really to think through the kind of support provision support provision we need to put in place be it financial support to help people tie over during the rescaling period or the car incentive would have put on the table to nudge the enterprises to move towards a sustainable future yeah thanks um could you just explain in Singapore how your organisation works i presume you work with government i know you've worked in the Singaporean government in the past so how how does the collaboration work and how long has you know the skills future how long has that been going on for yeah skills such as Singapore we are in government agency under the ministry education so we are um if we put it that way we are a skilled a skills authority of Singapore so we identify the emerging skills and future skills need of the economy and then we translate it into training programs we work with organisations like cosera we work with organisations like generations to as an intermediary to see how can programs and and be available to the citizens for for transitions or to help organised to help enterprises identify talent and skills needs so we do do this ongoing these with or without covid but during covid i think there was a time that we need to quickly ramp up training and training ships to help to hold um a fresh grab from the market because last year the class of 2019 was badly hit i think class of 2020 is slightly better so i think we have a think through how to help 2020 is badly hit as well so i think we need to think through how to create job opportunity very quickly over over over a short period of time and we also use big data to look into where are the what are the in-demand jobs that we can transit people over including creating skills profiling tools to profile people so that they can understand these are the nearest adjacent job that they can go into very quickly and we still have to employ to see where where else can they find uh sometimes to land land the staff out if they have access uh resources and manpower how to land the people out to other industry very quickly so these are kind of some of the things that we do on B scaling efforts yeah okay and and how long have you know have you there existed as an organisation working with government specifically looking at skills like this i mean how many years have you been operating um as as skill futures Singapore uh since 2016 but if you look back the history uh with the the the forebody of skill futures involves workforce development agency that was in 2003 and if you look at the history of Singapore we've been we have been looking at workforce rescaling since the day we the nation is created so it's about 50 over a year really it's quite incredible and unusual i mean can you give examples of other governments around the world that have something similar in place i would say that uh we are quite unique in the way that because we see our Singapore citizens as valuable assets that every one of the citizens must have a fulfilling career and to help them have a fulfilling career um in various uh life stages therefore if we invest a lot of a substantive amount of uh resources to make sure that we have free educations from primary secondary to tertiary so tertiary are highly funded uh by universities at least 70 percent and then they are bursary um so i think that's a front-end part of the pre-education and training but the the lifelong learning part is even um causing us more resources because everybody as a Singaporean for example for 25 year old and above you have skill future credits that you can defray our pocket expenses for the lifelong learning and the curated causes which is uh which is based on what the the future economy will need are highly subsidized as well from 70 percent to 90 percent depends on your depend on the profile of the workforce i think at the end of the day we want to ensure that economic growth does cascade down to individuals citizens of career success and also supporting a competitive economy okay thank you that's really a really good illustration of collaboration between government between business between society dan give us your take on this i mean you not only run check which is specifically supporting students providing services for students which is the future workforce but also you invest in lots of silicon valley companies you've got your you know you've got your eye on a lot of organizations so from your perspective what are the promising approaches the question i've put to the other two you know for post pandemic upskilling across industry yeah first of all thank you sally and and i appreciate all the comments that have been made already i think they're spot on and very constructive and laying out sort of the giant framework the thing that we see is this the the pandemic just accelerated the inevitable it didn't cause this problem um what what hasn't been said explicitly and i'm just going to say it is all of the economies around the world are becoming tech and that doesn't mean everybody has to be an engineer it just means everybody has to understand and utilize technology in whatever role that they happen to be playing so if you're in sales and you can't use sales force you're not likely to be able to be successful in the role of sales going forward if you're in the creative world and you can't use adobe then you're not likely going to be successful and so i think we have to first acknowledge a couple of things that we need that the system of education is no longer aligned with its primary constituents which are the students who 80 percent of them if they choose to go on to higher education are going on for the purposes of getting a better career so we have to look at the cost of education we have to look at the way education is delivered in-person education in a world where the overwhelming majority of people have families and have jobs while they're learning no longer can serve the constituency that it needs to to serve at scale so we have to look at the cost of education the way education is delivered the curriculum that's delivered the length of time it takes to get a so-called degree the fact of the matter is if you just look at the united states as an example of the first world country that people think are doing extraordinarily well 50 percent of high school students go on to higher education and almost half of them never get a degree so 75 percent of the u.s. population doesn't even have a college degree so the question is what should we be learning how should we be learning it how long should it take and how do we realign the learner with the ultimate consumer of that learning which are businesses and so institutions whether they're government institutions or educational institutions or businesses need to realign with the future of work we don't really need big data to tell us what jobs are growing we can see it we can see what companies are opening up we can see they're all tech-enabled in nature and again you don't have to be an engineer you don't have to learn to code you don't have to do those things in fact software is being built so you never have to learn to code but if you're not able to utilize the tools of the modern workforce you're not going to be able to be skilled up skilled or reskilled and we have you know people running the panels later who do all of those things extraordinarily well and so you see the majority of growth of where learners are going is either direct to learn it themselves because government institutions are not really creating the right curriculum or they're going into the workforce so 60 percent of the people have jobs they can work with the great companies like Coursera, Udacity and others to get skilled in the workplace but for the people that don't have jobs or don't have companies that provide that it needs to be low cost on demand and it needs to have actual support that can scale with them so that when they get stuck they can get unstuck the two primary reasons people drop out of learning is because they can't afford it or they get stuck and there's nobody to get them unstuck and so we just what we see from the students and Chegg now is global we weren't domestic us for a long time but you know we've we've been discussing the fact that we'll have well over a million subscribers for Chegg help outside the US and we have our thing for organization which focuses on upskilling, not so much rescale. Reskilling is for the people that are being displaced now upskilling is for people who are in jobs but the skills are evolving and then there's just skilling which is K through 12 early learning should be skilling you in job and job capabilities and I'm amazed that the curriculum of the institutions and the government don't focus on that it's easier to learn it while you're young than to get re-skilled when you're old what we do know is technology will displace jobs faster than they've ever displaced them before and that is tragic and I agree that we need to find financial support for those people and education for those people but the fact is over the last 25 years technology has actually created more jobs than existed before they're just different kinds of jobs and so we need to understand that skills that were appropriate 25 years ago five years ago may not be appropriate to be teaching now and institutions including the government including education institutions need to realign with the students needs and businesses goals. Okay and and whilst you've all been talking we've been getting some questions through which is great so we'll start to bring those through so Bob if I throw this one at you and then to a degree down you've already touched on this actually so you've already answered it to a degree but one watching us at the moment has asked the question you know who is responsible for developing skills employer or individual Bob and actually it's everyone isn't it it's employer individual business community etc but the but when it's everyone it's hard to to get in get stuck in isn't it because everyone's looking to everyone else aren't they I think that's right but let's go back to what it takes to actually do this do this well and do it in scale as Dan was talking about first let's get a taxonomy created so we understand what kind of skills we're talking about how to talk about them we have the right nomenclature and the weft has done a lot of good work in this regard second you've got to have accessibility to those credentialing capabilities whether they come from a government or whether they come from a business organization whether they come from an employer or a business that focuses on this as a specialization and that's important in terms of as Dan said the quality of the curriculum and the effectiveness and efficiency in terms of the cost and the ease of which people can tap into that resource so there's not only a mandate for them to do that they're willing to actually jump into it themselves on a self-motivated basis which comes to the other piece you need which is you got to actually deal with the incentives and this comes in two ways incentives for people to lean into these opportunities incentives for businesses to do it now I will tell you the business community should be self-incentives otherwise you're not going to have the employees or the talent you need to actually do the work of the future that is going to be required of you but you also have to need to find people the time to do this I'll share with you even when we did it for ourselves the number one issue was I have my day job I want to reskill I want to upskill but the real is I don't have time to do it so you have to actually think about that as well as you look forward and last but not least you talked about who's who's responsible well let's go to the topic of accountability this is where government should be really clear in terms of what they're planning on doing and are they accountable and have they delivered against those results likewise business being accountable in terms of not only what they may do to help the skills but the impact they are having from availing themselves or letting people to be available to the actually tap into those skills so reporting is an equal amount of a tool that actually could be actually helping us get to that accountability and specifically that point selling who's responsible who's doing it and who's actually demonstrating the progress in a positive way and you're starting to see that country by country and business by business in terms of the impact that are looking at yeah absolutely and Dan you've already touched on the fact that quite a few who will be leading discussions later I mean they're involved in in businesses that are trying to help educators and organizations in terms of technology provision but don't you think that I certainly my experience of the pandemic has been I've got three children who are all at different schools at different ages what COVID-19 did was it forced schools certainly across the UK and I'm sure in many other countries to suddenly get on board with technology because all the kids are at home and that's caused huge you know stress at the time but but massive progress in a very short period of time would you say yeah look there has been progress and as I said check has been built to bet on the inevitable there's a reason that we now have nearly you know approaching 10 million customers around the world and a company that most people haven't heard of and it's because there are a lot of self-motivated people that need help and will seek help employers are incentive to have an educated workforce students and parents and governments are incentive it's the educational institutions that have never actually been held accountable for producing employable people there's no accountability on the price there's no accountability on the curriculum so even though yes now they are using technology they didn't evolve the curriculum they didn't evolve the speed in which they can teach the curriculum they didn't start utilizing the tools in which to support students they still haven't arranged it so that it can be on demand I mean just look at the United States as a singular example 26 percent of all students already have children we're choosing we're forcing people to choose between learning and earning so it's not just that they use technology they used it at least in higher education so that they can continue to collect the money as opposed to understanding what the technology can actually enable people to do which is to learn for less learn on demand learn on scale get personalized help and so it's not just that they appreciate what technology can do and just just to give you a couple of quick quick statistics 75 of all students now that go to higher education say that they would prefer a hybrid environment where only about 40 percent said that before COVID so COVID did accelerate that and nearly half of professors now agree that technology can be used to educate however the overwhelming majority of them are at vocational or two-year schools and not four-year schools because four-year schools still would prefer to be four years not commit to full-time teaching not make it on demand and so there's still a lot of work to go so yes progress has been made but i think we need to understand the alignment is between the learner the employer and the institutions need to be in the middle to allow for those people to have the right curriculum at the right speed with the right credentials to be employable in the modern workforce and that there needs to be an affirmative ROI on the cost whoever pays it check happens to believe employers should pay we pay off all of our employees student debt we pay for continuing education but there are many people that pay and and so whoever pays is going to want to see a return on it okay absolutely i'm sure for sure before we go to part two soon do i just want to get one more comment from you because we've had a a question in from from someone who's who's with us on this discussion saying how do you actually encourage people to want to reskill and i mean that that is a big issue isn't it hmm thanks for the question selly uh yes this is it is a challenge i would i would say that even when we started to issue out in 2016 every 25 year old and above Singaporean get 500 dollars give you your credits and in fact last year we just had another top power 500 dollars and for for citizens 40 and above we have another extra 500 so people like myself have $1,500 to spend so having having that um um credit in the pockets is kind of um giving them baby empowerment to make decisions about what skills what kind of training they want to go for and i thought it somehow has has moved the needle a bit i would say moved a needle a bit because people felt that hey i have the money i have to spend within five years and have to think carefully uh where should i invest my time and and with this money what can i do in my career this is number one number two i thought uh we we use the term sign posting to us sign posting is quite important because it's not about just giving giving out the money but how do they know what is the skills in demand how do they know uh where do they want to go how do they know what kind of options they have so i think the sign posting from us is very important to explain to them that these are the various options in the care economy in the digital economy in the green economy and you can you can make certain decisions about where you want to go and then how much it's going to cost you how much time it's going to involve so at least you can see that with an investment how far you can go with the next S curve for your career so i would say that incentive is important a sign posting is important and equally important will be the kind of support not just online that they can self navigate on on the portal that we have called my ski Witcher portal but make available face to face over the over they can they can make appointment to talk to a career coach to talk to a skills ambassador is available in Singapore so we make all this available throughout the whole Singapore people can just walk into a counter make appointment and and have someone to talk to i think that will allow us to to encourage people to want to come forth to to participate in rescaling on their own on the other hand is to encourage employer to continue to rescale their workforce because i think that's quite important employer play the role of identifying skills develop skills and use the skills and and more importantly pay for the skill as well so i think we need to we need to be able to mobilize both the citizen individual and also the employers okay all right soon Ju thank you so much so that brings to a close part one of of this session so i just want to explain how the next part work so where we have been live streaming this so far will be directed all of us into breakout rooms next so this next part is a private discussion it's very interactive so just to remind you all that Chatham house rules will apply in this next session it'd be lovely for those of you whilst you're in the breakout rooms do turn your cameras on so we can all see each other and of course remember to be muted or unmuting depending on what's going on and your discussion leader in your breakout rooms will guide you through the next exercise so let me introduce to you who the discussion leaders are we've got Andrew Beard who's chief executive for education sorry the chief executive of education for employment we've got Gabriel Dal Porto who's chief executive of Udacity we've got Jeff Maggio and Calder who's CEO of Coursera company's already been mentioned many of these companies have been mentioned already and we've got Dr. Mona Moshad who's chief executive of Generation so do enjoy a part to get very involved make the most of this time we will reconvene all of us a little later to just share what's been discussed in the breakout rooms but for now just wait as we pause for five minutes as we allow for the transition to take place