 The global crisis is our immediate action, youth unemployment, 75 million young people to create a 15-year-old unemployment in 2012, and into 2010. Advanced members of the animal kingdom is taking care of our young. Animals will sacrifice themselves for their young. Parents will sacrifice themselves to provide health and education for their children. So why is it, while we are individually so committed to our young, and we are collectively failing them so badly? This is the topic of this session. Today's youth make up 17% of the world's population, but 40% of the unemployed. There are almost 75 million unemployed youth today, and five years after the beginning of the Great Recession, that number isn't getting better, it's getting worse. It's not just a cyclical issue, it's a structural issue. In terms of changing employment markets, in terms of growing labor pools in many parts of the world, and a mismatch between what they receive as education in schools, and what they need to perform in their jobs. So how can we address this issue? How can we actually go from bemoaning the problems to looking for concrete solutions? I'm joined today by an extraordinary panel to help, together with yourselves in the audience, and those involved in the conversation over Twitter, around the world, to see what we can be doing individually and collectively to deal with what is one of the great crises of our time. To start, I'm delighted to, Maria Fanjul, turn over to you. An entrepreneur who's worked and studied around the world, moved from Silicon Valley back to your home country of Spain, is the CEO of entradas.com, one of the leading e-commerce portals in Spain. But not only are you a great entrepreneur, you're also a member of that generation, which is in danger of becoming a lost generation. So Maria, welcome, and how do the youth of Spain today see the situation and look to their future? Thank you. So yeah, as you said, this is a big issue. We're talking about 75 million youth unemployed, 25% unemployment rate in Spain, sorry, in Europe, 57% in Spain. So this is a big issue that is actually discouraging many, many young people, and that actually involves like three big areas. So it's about mainly our cultural mindset, our risk aversion, why we're afraid of trying new things and proposing new ideas, also why this education is so that we receive, doesn't have much to do with what companies are demanding, what the skills are being demand, and also the lack of entrepreneurship that we have in Spain. So now we're trying to, Spain and Europe, I would say, we're trying to bring more entrepreneurs on the table in order to not only reduce youth unemployment, but also trying to encourage young people to be owners of their own lives. So what I would say is we as youth think that we are evolved in this problem so that we need to be part of the solution. We want to be part of the solution because in my case, for example, I'm a young entrepreneur CEO of a 70 people e-commerce company. I deal with these problems every day. So I think I must work with governments, institutions, universities and civil society so that we all together come up with solutions. And Maria, you're also a member of the Global Shapers, this dynamic group of individuals from around the world in the age of 20 to 30. I believe you had a gathering in Spain a few months ago where you yourselves, of your generation, were looking at what could be done. What were some of the ideas that came out? Yeah, so it was very interesting to see how a hundred Global Shapers from all over Europe, from 27 different hubs came to Spain and for two days we were not discussing about what's going on with youth unemployment. We were working on specific projects that we had an impact on, such as, for example, trying to make recruiting process much more dynamic so that it can be a learning process as well. So companies, instead of just doing an interview and in one hour trying to ask very theoretical questions, trying to do a much more practical challenge so that you can see how the person behaves and also that person can learn from that process. Also, another thing that we proposed it was called Codenation and it's about having kids learn software skills since they're very little. Why? Because technology is transforming industries. So it should be as important for kids as they learn maths or literature. And if you have these skills, maybe eventually you're able to start a company or to propose new ideas in your existing company because you already know how to do it or you're confident with that. Well, in this whole element of supporting the right mindset with an entrepreneurial mindset, ensuring they have the right relevant skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow and also helping them making that education to workforce transition in terms of the interview process and making sure that interview process is a learning process for them as well. Those are some of the ideas that came out. And Klaus Kleinfeld, you as the CEO of Alcoa and as of Siemens before, having worked and being involved around the world, you've seen lots of different situations around the world and it's worth noting that while we talk about a 20-something percent unemployment rate in Europe as a whole, it ranges from 57% in Spain to 6% in Switzerland for youth unemployment and under 10% in Germany. In fact, the lowest level in 20 years in Germany. So Klaus, how do you see the situation and how do you as a CEO try to get involved in addressing this? Well, it's fascinating when you look at the problem. You mentioned the range, but there's one other statistic that just came out with a recent McKinsey study. 50s and it's done basically in developed countries, so not in developing countries. 57% of the employers complain about not finding the right people for the job openings. And at the same time, if I look at the US, by 2018 about 25% of the manufacturing workers will retire. So there's obviously a misalignment, there's a mismatch which we have to build into this. So, and that I think is also where the opportunity lies. In our experience, it almost is like what good old Karl Popper says. I mean, many rows lead to a solution and every single one can help. You can attack it from various angles. And if I look at what Alcoa does and other companies do too, we attack it from the origination of the school from K to 12. We have a program, for instance, that reaches out to girls in eighth grade at Whitehall, Michigan. And the way this works is we roll two cohorts of girls through our facility, show them how manufacturing is today, expose them to this facility. Interestingly, about 90% of the women that go through this program go to college. More than 70% of those take a STEM education in college. I'm absolutely convinced they would not have, even in their wildest dreams, have gone for this. If they wouldn't have been exposed to how exciting the life in the modern manufacturing environment is, so you can start there. You can go then to the college level. I mean, today we have the strange idea in many places that if you haven't gone from K to 12 to college, you are not fit for society, which is not true. I mean, I think we've seen that community colleges, occupational training can play an important role in the education process. I mean, it can be the alternative to going to a normal college, much more oriented towards a certain degree that's kind of aligned with what the needs are. We've seen that working in regional clusters with community colleges, helping the communities build a curriculum that's in tune with the future needs of those regions is a very, very efficient program. It can be a community college program that's a full-fledged one, or it can be something that is offered in the evening hours or on the weekend so that people can do it while they are working. So there's a whole host of things. Another interesting statistic is that we saw a lot of young people don't know where to look for openings and are simply missing a good guidance, you know? And there are multiple ways how to do it. I mean, it can start in school with a guidance counselor. The guidance counselor also needs guidance. So we have to train the guidance counselors, you know, and help them to be better. Or there's an initiative also in the US to have an internet platform that's called Hope Street, you know, which a lot of folks sponsor so where people can go online and check their profile and match it with the openings and also match it with what additional educational courses are there and what sponsoring opportunities are there. One issue that comes with this is very often the accreditation because you want it as portable as possible. You know, so there's a whole, I would call it a bouquet, you know, that you can bring to the table. One issue that remains is the perception. I mean, it's pretty shocking. I mean, we did a survey recently in the US and only 20% of parents would really, if their child came to them and were to say, look, I want to go work in a manufacturing environment, only 20% of the parents would advise that that's a good idea. So there's obviously a huge perception issue coming along with this. So, I mean, a number of the elements, making sure that the education is actually matched and business playing an important role in that. This idea of actually ensuring there's a more efficient market between the requirements and the people's looking for jobs. But also this issue of status, credentialization, recognition, ironically, the places where there are the most opportunities either in many of the engineering manufacturing, technical areas, or in the creating, the entrepreneurship, those two areas are in many societies, jobs that have less status than some of the traditional public sector or big private sector jobs. I think this goes away when people we get exposed to it, like the girls did. I mean, what's the prejudice? They think it's a dirty job, they think it's a repetitive job, and they think it's a job that doesn't pay well. Once they get exposed to it, they see that it's not dirty at all, it's not repetitive at all, it has a lot of career opportunities, it's very technical, and you do something for society, you create something real, you know? And you get excited. I mean, the white hall with the turban blades, so people think of, hey, I built the next jet engine, you know, and I'm part of the next most efficient gas turbine. And that is super exciting, you know? And Kali Dalferi, as the CEO of Saudi Aramco, you are a key leader in the region that actually, although we talk a lot about the challenges of Europe, the region of Middle East and North Africa actually has the highest level globally of youth unemployment. Challenge economically, a challenge socially. Saudi Aramco has been leading in terms of thinking and acting on this. How do you see the particular challenges in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and what can businesses actually do about this? Well, I can maybe focus on the oil and gas industry and countries that have resources in that area. And the dichotomy you see within the region, but also outside the region, is here is an industry that is growing, that is very profitable, that has opportunities to grow even further and more often than not, companies in our industry are constrained by growth because of lack of skilled human resources. While they are living in countries or working in countries where there are high unemployment, high youth unemployment in particular and high levels of spending on training and development of this youth. So the issue of mismatch that Klaus referred to Israel and it's in the hundreds of thousands of trained, educated on paper, young people that are out there seeking jobs while companies are bringing labor from other countries trying to do the projects on hand because of this mismatch. Now what we've done in Saudi Aramco and this is an evolution, something we've learned over many decades is try to turn this perceived problem of youth unemployment into a competitive advantage and an opportunity. And we've done it on two broad directions. One is within our own human capital, our own human resources. And the direction we have taken is I would refer to it as making our own human capital rather than hiring it from the outside. And by making, I mean we literally hire young kids as apprentices and we pay them very competitive stipends that exceed what they would get if they were to go and get employed even after some university degrees. We keep them for multiple years on training programs through our own in-house vocational training program. The capacity at any one time is 8,000 people over the years. We have hired 80,000 of these apprentices into our workforce. We also take people and send them to universities around the world, from China to the US and every country in between. Countries where we do business, we get university graduates and then we send them on to advanced degrees to become our researchers and scientists and leaders within the company. They come back, they are loyal, because we caught them at the age of 17. We not only developed their hard skills but their soft skills. They're indoctrinated into our corporate culture. Their retention levels are extremely, extremely high, their loyalty. It has become truly a competitive advantage for Saudi Aramco and it is being copied. I am pleased elsewhere and I recommend it for many of the CEOs who are listening. The second direction which is more difficult is stepping outside our own boundaries and looking at the business space we work in. Not only the oil and gas and the chemicals and the energy but even our supply chain. And we look at ourselves in Saudi Aramco and say we spin off a lot of value in the Saudi economy that is not creating adequate jobs. So we're stepping in, we're leading and facilitating for industry clusters to work with us to create what I call multi-private public partnership where we bring a number of industry players with the National Vocational Training Agency, for example. They fund building vocational training centers. We put in our competency requirements, our curricula for the training. We fund bringing some of the high-skilled trainers to eliminate the mismatch in skills that we talked about earlier. And then they become available for the broader business community. It gives us security of our supply chain. It creates goodwill in society. So it helps us in the long term that would reduce our cost, that would reduce our risk as a result of skill shortages. And I think more importantly, it will address at the same time a societal need that will ensure our business is much more sustainable from a human resource and a societal relationship standpoint. These are powerful examples in the Western and Saudi Arabia of companies getting engaged, not just saying we're gonna take the human capital out there, but we're actually gonna be involved in partners in helping to develop and support the generation of human capital. And what I found Khalid very powerful there is not just saying within Saudi Aramco, significant though it is, but actually along the entire supply chain in the ecosystem. And there is this sense that although the macro conditions are difficult at the micro level, at the corporate and the industry at the sector level, things can happen to help address this issue. Now, Muhtar Kent as not only the CEO of Coca-Cola, but also as the chairman of our International Business Council are gathering of some of the most significant corporations from around the world. You've really helped lead the charge over the last year in terms of this community thinking about this issue. In fact, yesterday, almost the entire session was spent on what can business actually be doing concretely to contribute to this issue? Maybe you could share some of your thoughts on the challenge and also what can businesses here in the IBC but also in the audience be contributing on this issue. Thank you. You have to pull the microphone. Thank you. I think all the statistics, so one doesn't have to repeat them again, but there is a growing, I think environment out there that business is seeing that it has to play a very important, proactive role. It cannot solve the problem itself. It has to partner with government. It has to partner with civil society, create the golden triangle on the ground, conceptually and on the ground to play an important role in bringing down youth unemployment. And I think companies all have a role to play here, small, medium and large. We all have a role to play. That's why for the last year or so, we at the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum that you just mentioned, Robert, have been working on this matter, on this issue. We touched on it last year at the IBC meeting, International Business Council meeting here. We prepared for a very robust discussion in the summer of 2013 in Geneva for that and then together yesterday with 100 or so CEOs that are members of the International Business Community gathering together with mayors because the uniqueness of the meeting yesterday was we invited mayors from all around the world, city mayors, urban city mayors, CEOs of cities, cities like Buenos Aires, cities like Rome, cities like Istanbul, cities like Atlanta, cities like Madrid, Johannesburg, all around the world where roughly 25% of the population of the world and 50% plus of the GDP of the world reside today. And we invited also civil society organizations, OECD, others, universities to come into the room and really talk about ideas and we separated nine different opportunities from supporting entrepreneurialism to short-term work, to internships, education that was mentioned by Klaus and Halid. So we had a very robust discussion. The fact that the shapers, young global shapers were in the room, getting their opinion about the issue that faces them, that millennial generation, the fact that the mayors were in the room added significant value to the discussion, great ideas surfaced and I think now we have to go out and make it happen on the ground. The purpose is now to ensure that we can have best practices circulated, companies committed to this matter of doing something tangible, both inside the company and outside the company. And I'll give you a couple of examples and that's what we've committed yesterday. And as I said, working with sub-national government, I think is the way to go because they can act. They are action biased and they are time compressed, just like us in business. So it's no longer a talk marathon, but it's actually an action biased agenda. And that's where we ended up and this will be a multi-year task. So we'll come back next year at the same IBC meeting and put on the table, not start with another white page. We'll start with a page that says what worked, what didn't work, what did we learn, how do we make it better? And that's the purpose of all the preparation, all the time we spent on this matter. And again, I think companies cannot just say we commit to this idea, we'll hire another thousand interns. What is a good program has to be designed for a company to create value for itself and also employ more youth. I'll give you a couple of examples. The Coca-Cola system employs 770,000 people around the world in 207 countries. But outside of the Coca-Cola company, its supply chain employs 10 million people, direct supply chain of the Coca-Cola company, one to 12. So we have a program called Five by 20. Five, we've committed to empower economically 5 million women by 2020 outside of the Coca-Cola company. We are creating small distributors, distributorships, training women, mentoring women, getting microcredit from the IFC, which is a partner of ours in this endeavor. And we are creating small distributors of consumer goods products across the world. They in turn become hire more women and we've reached already, it's audited by an outside firm and we've already reached by the December 2013, 337,000. That is value for us and that's value for the communities because we know that if we do not help create sustainable communities where we operate and where we sell our products, we will not be able to continue to sell our products if those communities are not sustainable. Similarly, if we do not do something about this youth unemployment, it is for sure what's gonna happen is the social peace and the social mosaic in the world as we know it is gonna crack. Make no mistake, it's gonna crack. And that is probably the greatest social challenge of our time. Can we ensure that youth feel engaged in this so they remain employed? Because a great tragedy in many parts of the world is the unemployed of today will become the unemployable of tomorrow if they stay out of the workforce for two or three years and in many parts of the world, including Europe with an aging population, that group needs to be as engaged and productive as ever. And in a sense, Coca-Cola may be larger than a number of the companies here, but every company is actually able to make a difference on this. And in fact, we've adopted the starfish strategy and it's based on the story of the boy who was walking along the beach and he saw another boy on this beach that was covered with millions of starfish picking up a starfish and throwing it into water, picking up a starfish, throwing in the water. And the first boy just said, the second boy, what do you do? And he said, I'm saving these starfish because they're stranded. And the first boy said, what are you doing? There's millions, you won't make a difference. Boy picked up a starfish, threw it in the water and he said, it made a difference to that one. And that's the point. Each company can actually make a difference for a number of these individuals and collectively it can create a new sense of momentum. Because the challenge of 75 million seems so large that it becomes sort of collectively so significant that it almost allows people to abdicate their individual responsibility. But in fact, it'll be addressed through these kind of actions individually, collectively, scaled up to actually move things forward, to ensure that the education and workforces are linked up, to ensure that there's entry into the workforce, to encourage entrepreneurship. Guy Ryder, the international labor organization that you lead has been really at the forefront of the thinking on this, examining, raising the urgency of the issue in a report that you came out with last week that showed that not only is it not getting better, it's getting worse, that by 2018 there may be 80 million unemployed if we continue on the present trajectory. What's your sense of the situation and then what's also your reaction to what you're hearing today? And what's your suggestions for the audience? Well, thank you. Let me just start with the big picture, as it were, as you have done. You've given all the statistics of matter, but let me just add a couple of points. We should be particularly worried, I think, to disaggregate the big figures. Youth unemployment is becoming long-term unemployment. About one third of young people who are unemployed have been out of the labor market for six months or more. That should worry us a great deal. About one in six young people in the developed world, the OECD world, is neither in jobs nor in training, the famous NEETs. That should worry us as well. 62 million jobs shortfall since the crisis broke. 32 million is explained in open unemployment increase. The rest is in withdrawal from labor market. Some 30 million people who are discouraged or otherwise have gone. They should worry us as well. Some very sort of telegraphic points about the discussion I've just heard. We cannot dissociate the situation in respect of youth unemployment from the overall unemployment situation. If general unemployment continues to rise, we can be pretty sure we're not going to make a significant dent in youth unemployment. So the macro environment, getting companies investing again, that matters above all. But that's not a reason not to focus on the specifics of young people. So let me do that. First is the skills question. We talk in a great deal and quite rightly so about the mismatch, employers who can't find the right people. I think we need to unpack this mismatch idea because when you look a bit closer, this becomes a very complex set of issues. Our survey work shows that young people in work are almost as frequently over-qualified for the job that they do. Many are under-qualified for the job that they do. This is complicated. What are the skills that employers are missing? Are they the cutting-edge technology skills or are they basic literacy and numeracy skills? The answer is all of those things. So we've really got to look very, very carefully at that. Then let's look at what has worked on youth employment as has been mentioned earlier on. Countries in otherwise quite sort of comparable circumstances perform very differently in terms of youth employment. And we know that Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Nordics, the Dutch, they do terrifically well. They do comparatively terrifically well. And then you look at the way that the world of work and the educational work comes together in dual educational schemes. And it seems that the type of apprenticeship and such-like schemes that are operated in those countries, they really deliver the goods. They get young people into the world of work. I think everybody's interested in learning and replicating that type of experience. Now, I'm enormously encouraged when I hear colleagues from the private sector say, well, our businesses want to be part of the story. We want to get people back to work. Our company will do this. Our company will do that. But I depart slightly from your starfish-thrower analogy because that's great. If you get enough companies doing the right thing, you'll get enough starfish back in the sea. You'll get enough young people back in the jobs market. But the fact of the matter is the apprenticeship schemes, the dual education schemes at work are firmly rooted in public policy areas and very sometimes quite sophisticated labor market institutions. This is not simply the aggregation of individual company initiative. It is company initiative and goodwill. The fact that these are beneficial for companies, I don't think it's an act of philanthropy to do this stuff, but it's based in institutions. It's based in trust between the social partners. You negotiate the terms upon which apprenticeships are worked out. So this is part of the challenge of transplanting German experience to the United States, for example, which is an interesting story in itself. Lastly, and it was referred to earlier on, public employment services. Young people need to be able to go somewhere. We don't invest enough, not nearly enough, in the types of active labor market policies that will help young people to find the jobs that may be out there. So I think let's not take just a partial approach. Let's put all of these ideas, all of these commitments together to find the answers. It occurs to me that apprenticeships were probably the first ever public-private partnership in the world of work. They sort of disappeared. Why didn't my generation go into the manufacturing sector? I come from the UK, because these were yesterday's jobs. We were brought up in the idea that tomorrow wasn't about making things, it was about selling things or dealing with money. There's a bit of a reset of that, I think, coming up. And we need to catch that wave too. Well, and interesting, Klaus, I know you want to comment, but actually Klaus and I both, our cooperative program was actually McKinney. The work-based training we got after college was actually in the professional services organization. So this concept is associated historically with the manufacturing of saying you can only learn certain things by doing, is actually alive and well in the most successful organizations around the world. Klaus, you wanted to make a point. What I wanted to add is I totally agree with Guy's comments, particularly on the point that you need a larger, you need a larger kind of dialogue, and it's great that companies are moving, but I think you are absolutely spot on to say there are other institutions that you want to move at the same time. The apprenticeship model is a model that has worked extremely well in all of these countries you mentioned, but it's 500 years old in those countries. It comes from a guild system, and I can tell you from transforming or bringing it over to the US, you suddenly face a situation that you don't have this tradition, which actually leads to being very strongly publicly supported. You know, you have an accreditation that's accepted in society, which doesn't exist when you want to transport it. You have public institutions that substantially sponsor it, doesn't exist in the start, you have to add it, and you have industry groups that stand behind it, and it's not just one single employer. So the small companies can cling on to those type of programs and don't have to start it afresh. So to get a program like that transformed into another region, you actually do need these type of organizations, including the unions, by the way, you know? And I think that that's happening now, but it's actually much, much more complicated to get this done right than it sounds, you know? And I would also be careful to say, and we had this discussion yesterday at the IBC, I mean, the apprenticeship is great, you know? But in countries that don't have that tradition, let's not throw the baby out with a bathtub because there are a lot of very good occupational training programs that people can do while they are at work, you know? And that gives them, for instance, a degree in welding. You know, welding is very hard in demand, you know, all around the world, also in the U.S. There's a lot of open position and actually you don't need to be the brightest one in STEM, you can become a welder. There are welding courses, for instance, that you can take in the evening hours and on the weekend, take a year or two, you know, depending on how much time you wanna take to put into it, and it gives you a sure way into a good job. There are machine operator, modern machine operator things there, but the answer to that is the community colleges are not the ones that can put these courses together because they don't know what exactly is required by the employers. So again, also this requires to actively work together with the colleges in their respective community. We have seen about 80% of our facilities in the U.S. work with the community colleges. We have not seen one case where the community colleges was not happy for us to come to them and say, hey, let's refine the curriculum. This is what we need in future. Let's put something together. And very often other companies in the regions then came out and said, well, we'd also support this. I mean, the general approach you apply to manufacturing, you apply it to a lot of other areas as well, including the idea of providing access to coding and some of the other skills people need for tomorrow. A couple of quick comments from the panel, then I'd actually like to turn it over to some of the shapers who've been involved in this as well. Let me just, we haven't talked too much about technology here and the role of technology. Well, technology is, in one respect, a great challenge for youth unemployment because unemployment in general, I think it's also a fantastic opportunity that needs to be leveraged better yesterday, particularly in the developed economies. Yesterday, the mayor of Madrid said, Serrano said, while the mayor of Johannesburg was talking, said my challenges are completely different in Madrid than they are in the emerging countries and she's right. So how can we leverage technology better? The definition, we have to start by saying the definition of work is gonna change in the Western world. Much more work and value added is gonna be done from the home. Leveraging technology, whether they leverage technology, provide a service by working at home, whether they actually provide a design by working at home, a concept from working at home, but a lot more because you don't need to actually get up in today's world, particularly in the Western world, if for many jobs, you don't actually need to get up, go to another place and work there to create value. You can create value from where you are and so I think we need to get used to the concept, different concepts at work and once we are much more comfortable with that, that's when I think we can leverage technology better and leverage social media better, get better ideas to circulate, convene virtually, and so forth. That's very important. Khalid and Maria. I would just go back to the point I made earlier of looking at your competitive advantage and how this whole issue of youth availability to participate in creating a more competitive, more sustainable company for all of us and not only as the workforce of the company but to pick up on a point made by Muhtar is looking at your supply chain, looking at your customers, looking at your business partners and investing early in the development of that ecosystem that will ensure your long-term sustainability. One thing we have done at Saudi Aramco is an entrepreneurship institute complemented with a venture capital fund of $200 million that are targeting small startups and the $2 million and below either through loans or even co-equity investing with them and innovative ideas that will help the Saudi economy but in particular around businesses that we can support through our procurement, through our contracts, through the services that we require. And it's a win-win-win. It's win for the young people that are jumping in on these opportunities. It's win for us because many of them will be supporting us and obviously it's a win for the Saudi economy and the ecosystem around us. I would also emphasize that education is an issue that everybody can support without necessarily reforming it from the ground up. And I think the technology issue that brought by Muhtar again and some of the initiatives that Klaus mentioned are very real and doable in every place you go. So you don't necessarily have to get the Ministry of Education to undo the curriculum and retrain the hundreds of thousands of teachers. You can reach the young people, the kids and the high schoolers with STEM education using technology. You can engage them through their summer holidays. You can complement this with summer programs that get them attracted to the right disciplines and ultimately become potential employees that you can target later on. And the science, technology, engineering and math you were referring to, Maria? Yeah. I was following Muhtar's comment on technology as well. I wanted to share an example of what we did in my previous company since this issue, as you said early, not only involves all of us as youth, but also the competitiveness of the companies when we're not finding the good skills for the jobs that we were posting. So we realized that we were looking for software developers that we couldn't find in Spain. So what we did was we partnered with one Spanish university and with startups in Silicon Valley so that we sent last year graduates from software engineering to the Valley to do internships, like six months internships in startups in the Valley. It was all covered by ourselves. And then afterwards, they came back and we hired them. And it was such a success that the year after, it was backed by Spanish Foundation and now we're sending around 50 students per year. And they eventually come back or they stay there but that really helps the empowerment and the competitiveness of the companies. That's a great example. And let me turn it over for comments or questions from the floor. We have a number of the global shapers with us here, if any of them would like to intervene on this. Please. OK, this is Rina. This is Rina, Rina Onor from Istanbulhub. I'm one of the global shapers. And we participated in the International Business Council meeting yesterday. So something that resonated with me that we discussed yesterday was that there's definitely a skill mismatch between educational university training and what the businesses are actually looking for. An example is that I run a gaming company in Turkey and there's a devastating number of computer scientists, graduates that we hire, who by the time they start work can't actually code. So we have to train them six months on top of their four-year university training. So that is a problem we discussed. But my question was an issue that we didn't discuss as much was how to incentivize the business knowers, the corporate world, because they are the ones who are providing the jobs after all. So what can we do to invigorate them at the national or the subnational level so they have an incentive to hire the new graduates and train them possibly? Thank you. Let's take a couple more here and then, pardon me. Hello, I'm Ziyad Mabsud from Beirut Hub. My question is to Mr. Faleh. The Arab world is facing the huge problem in news unemployment. And the oil and gas sector is actually located in the GCC area, that industry that has been creating jobs. The challenge is how can we approach other industries in other countries, like in Lebanon, Syria, eventually when there is stability, and North Africa. Thank you. Let's take a third one, please. Hi, my name is Chris Geary. I'm a global shaper from Hong Kong Hub. And a perception I have, I'd like to address to the panel, is one of dimensions. I think the way that we view work is quite monodimensional. I think that detracts from our ability to engage with young people. And I don't want to seem impertinent in picking up on an example that we used before. But in defining intelligence in terms of a welder, I think you're taking a one-dimensional view of what intelligence is. And maybe when we look at our education systems, we look at we define topics and subjects. Whereas we can look at, and I'd said this in a couple of sessions this week, I'm a very strong believer in that we need to redefine the way we educate for the world of work based on competencies and values. And then we can redefine the subjects that we teach. And then we can create relevance for the workforce. And education systems can properly support the needs of business. I'd be very interested in the comments of the panel. And the woman at the back, please. Hi, I'm Arun Dutty, a global shaper from the Bangalore Hub in India. I really appreciated that the panel took a long view on employability, and some of the initiatives started way back in high school. My experience mentoring young children in India from adolescence to livelihood has shown that the critical skills and behaviors that will lead to good workforce actually start in adolescence as young people are forming their identity, looking at people around them. One experience that I've had, and I'd like to see if any of your experiences have echoed that, is that when we've connected companies and their professionals to work with young people, it's actually been a big win-win for the company in terms of driving employee engagement. It's actually provided employees a sense of achievement beyond just their careers, and help them build critical skills like empathy and problem solving that they need actually to be good leaders in business. So I was wondering if you all had had similar experiences in your initiatives. Thank you. Fantastic. So the whole issue of the broader sense of skillset and mindset, the issue of how does one apply more broadly across the geographies in the Middle East, some of these opportunities, and also how does one create the right incentives, although ultimately the incentives create and improve the competitiveness of the corporation and the sector. But why don't we talk about, Khaled, would you like to start? On the issue of the Middle East, I think obviously there are economic and there are political issues that complicate and exaggerate or increase the problem, but some of the underlying issues are about demographics, economics, you will find them elsewhere and they are not specific to a region or an industry. When we talked yesterday in the IBC, it was amazing that no matter what businesses you're in, the extent of the problem, from a corporate standpoint, long-term competitiveness and sustainability, we're very pressing for the CEO as much as the concern about the societal impact on unemployment. And we found that the fundamentals of the solutions that worked and many companies are the same. It's hiring young, training, getting involved in education, creating apprenticeship. So whether it works in oil and gas, it's likely going to work in tourism in Lebanon or Egypt, it's going to work in some of the service industries, it's going to work in other manufacturing, industries as we have heard from many CEOs. So I would say that ultimately many countries in the Middle East obviously need to resolve political instability issues that need to create an environment for investment and long-term hiring and unleashing the power of our young people in the region. And I'm sure there are many employers that will take some of the lessons learned that we will be sharing with them that the IBC will be advocating. In term of the question about practices we have done to address the mismatch, we in Saudi Aramco encourage our employees to go to universities and lecture. We actually compensate them extra if they go and lecture. And the idea is to bridge the gap between academia and industry, but at the same time attract more and more people to join Saudi Aramco when they hear from our leading scientists what are they doing on the job and what are some of the exciting opportunities that exist within Saudi Aramco. Very quickly Middle East, you don't necessarily have to always have a very stable environment. We every year now in the Palestinian territory convene an innovation summit for young would-be entrepreneurs. Hundreds of people bring in ideas. Together we have partners in this, local partners, we have partners like Cisco, they come in, they bring ideas and all those people either go and form their own companies with small seed money or they get employed. They get employed by us, they get employed by others. So just one idea, I'm saying there is a lot to be done today, but at the same time, we have to all start thinking about what is the 21st century education going to be, not the 20th century. Not everybody has to have a four year degree of bachelor's degree and not everybody has to have to be successful. Everybody does not have to have an MBA to go into the finance sector, to go to the services sector. All that has to change and we have to help that change in business. We have to partner closer with universities and a much closer partnership with cities to make that education 21st century so that we can actually feed in the right, provide that mismatch to go down. Well, on the last question, it was more a comment from the lady from India. I fullheartedly agree. The employer engagement aspect on being involved, I mean, working with the young kids, bringing graduates in, internships is very, very gratifying. It also plays, many of our facilities are not in urban centers, are in rural areas, it plays an enormously important role to be a good citizen in this community. So it's hugely, hugely encouraging. On this point that was asked as the first question, I mean, incentives for, to get more young graduates in, this is a broader topic. It's the whole question of how do you manage the inflow of talent? And there's a whole host of things how you do it. One thing that I believe is essential that you have a very good evaluation system and I personally believe in a normative function that you basically weed out about 10% of the ones that are not performing best. So that you basically, even in a non-growth environment, that you open positions. And I think it's the job of the CEO to really be radical on this, open the positions and make sure that there's an inflow of young talent. Because otherwise the organization gets way too comfortable, particularly when you are not in a high growth environment. The other point that is extremely important is to have systems that help prepare people not for the jobs of today, but for the jobs of tomorrow. And in many cases, therefore, the attitudes and mindset will be at least as important as the specific skill set. Because the jobs of 20 years from now will be radically different than the ones that exist today. And they may be ones that even we can imagine at this point. So it's not just to employ people today, but to actually equip them to have the resilience for the jobs of tomorrow. What I would like to do at this point is ask Moutar if you could perhaps comment upon the global shapers community. Because this is an extraordinary group that's been set up about three years ago with people in the ages of 20 to 30. They've been actively involved in this in so many issues because their unofficial amado is don't do things about us without us. And we all benefit by having them actively involved. Moutar, are you being one of the real supporters of the forum of this from the beginning? Perhaps I can turn the microphone. Yeah, just very, very quickly. I think it's one of the best things the World Economic Forum did, has done in the last three years. To include the young people in shape. It all started three years ago at the Dead Sea Summit when Arab Spring was just months old and there was a 23 or four-year-old girl that was on the main plenary stage that came up and talked a completely different language about the aspirations of Middle Eastern youth and why it was so important to change. And that changed the dialogue and that idea was born there in a way and Klaus Schwab through his leadership took it forward. We're very proud to be the first supporter and I wanna thank Reliance and Abraj, the other supporters of the World Economic Forum and invite other supporters to come and support the global shapers so that it can become even a bigger community. Now, 3,000, 3,000 all across the world. 305 hubs growing and changing the dialogue into a much better dialogue we all learn. Every time our organization collaborates in any hub across any country our people learn. We benefit a lot and I know that we have a great collaboration and the change of dialogue is greatly welcomed. Maria? Yeah, so I think it's very, very important and we are all impressed about the importance that the forum has given to us in this event. 50 of us are here in the global shapers community and as Mita was saying, we are already putting some projects into practice that can be leveraged on and can be shared and try to put into practice in other countries. So that's what I think we are, we're people of action and for example yesterday in the IBC meeting, we were like, yeah, well, these are all ideas but how do we implement them? So let's try to keep the ball rolling and put the ball rolling and leverage on that. Well, thank you very much and at this point I have two very pleasurable tasks. The first is to thank this panel for their great interventions and then secondly it would be to invite the global shapers to come and take the stage because you really represent the future. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.