 I'm very excited to be here. This is my first session this week in Sonata and it's a great session actually the one I'm most excited about. Accelerating the reskilling revolution. There could not be anything more important to talk about than labor and education and how to make it a win-win. And I have a great panel here to kick off with me. We're basically going to be looking at the way in which labor markets have evolved post-pandemic, the technological shifts, the green transition, all of the challenges that are added to the challenges that we were already talking about two years ago in sessions like this and the result being that there are about a billion people in the world that are going to need reskilling, training and lifelong learning by 2030. So we're going to take about 45 minutes or so to talk about what's been done so far, what needs to be done. I'm your moderator. I'm Rana Faroohar from the Financial Times and CNN and let me just briefly introduce our panel and then we're going to have some opening remarks from Sadia Zahadi who's the Managing Director of WEF. So directly here to my right is, sorry, sorry to my left is Bob Moritz who's the Global Chairman of PWC, USA, International Business Council. Welcome. And to his left is Salil Parkesh, the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Infosys. Welcome. And we have Mariam Jamey, am I pronouncing it correctly? The founder and Chief Executive Officer of I Am The Code from the UK. And we also have directly to her left, Jeff, I'm going to try to get the name right, Magio Calda. Magio Calda. Okay, I got it. Chief Executive Officer of Coursera. And finally, at the very end, we have Nagio Boudin who is the Prime Minister of Tunisia. Welcome Tunisia, welcome minister. So we're going to get started with questions for them in just a minute. But first, I'm going to welcome up Saida, who's off to the left there to make a few opening comments. Hello everyone. Welcome to the annual meeting 2022. Thank you for being here. I think our conversation today could not come at a more crucial time. This is one of the most important issues that we're going to be discussing during our time here in the next days. The investment case for education, reskilling, upskilling is so clear. To give one example, in our collaboration with PwC, 6.3 trillion could be added to global GDP through investment in reskilling and upskilling. In other 2.3 million, the 2.3 trillion possible through investment in education 4.0. Those are just some of the financial returns that countries could have. In addition to that, of course, there are very important social returns and many multipliers. Now, this is familiar to all of you. And so two years ago, at the last time that we came together at the annual meeting, we launched the reskilling revolution initiative, a 10-year initiative to reach a billion people with better education, better skills, and better economic opportunities. Two years in, the initiative has reached over 100 million people, but more importantly, started creating the foundations for the systemic change that we need on this issue. And I hope with all of you and with our panelists and key champions for this initiative, we'll be able to double that progress in this coming year. Thank you, Rana. Back over to you. Okay. Thanks so much. I also just want to remind everybody that we are live streaming this session. If you want to talk on social media about it, it's hashtag WEF2022. And also, we'll be taking questions. I'll have a pad later on that folks can send questions to. If you're not in the audience, if you are in the audience, there'll be mics running around. So think about what you might want to ask the panel. Bob, I'm going to start with you because you've been involved in this initiative for a really long time. You've also done quite a bit of reskilling and upskilling in your own workforce, which I'm really fascinated by. I guess my question is, talk about priorities. I mean, this is an enormous topic, both at a global level, but also I would imagine at a company level, at an institutional level, how do you decide where to start when you're taking on the task? Yeah, true question. So first and foremost, as we look at the labor force today, one of the biggest issues that's come out of the research, and Sadia mentioned some of the research that we've done, there's an inherent lack of trust between the employer and the employee. And that's part, just part of the challenges you think about the great resignation that many countries and part of the world are dealing with right now. But the reality is, with all of the different challenges, the concept of engaging talent more so, enabling more trust and skilling them is an actual multiplier effect. Meaning, if I've got a challenge in terms of the education system, if I got a challenge in terms of the social disruption that's out there, if I've got a challenge in terms of an upcoming economic challenge, this is an end solution. It's not an or a bolt on. So everything that we've done in terms of rebranding ourselves, everything that we've done in terms of the skills and the relevancy all comes back to how do we get our people better enabled to make them a better asset. Now, if I can't, I want to pivot a little bit because the ESG agenda, which is top of mind for everybody here in Davos, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the east side of the equation. This is an area where we're going to focus more so on the east side of the equation. And it comes back to the employee relationship. And it goes to every angle, every angle of the supply chain of talent going from youth all the way up. And as you think about what is needed there, there's three things that we found in our research. Number one, work has to fundamentally be redesigned. And by that redesign is not only the work you're doing, but actually how the work gets done. And if you engage your people in that redesign, you'll have more trust, more connective, more engagement. The second thing actually upskilling, where the skilling exercise actually enables them and gives them more confidence. Research also has shown that our people that are more likely to leave are the ones lacking the skills. Those that have the skills are willing to actually lean in. They're willing to ask for that promotion. They're willing to engage more. They're willing to deliver more. So it's a win-win for everybody. And the last point I would say with everything going on in the world, you've got to create an environment to have safe conversations. The reality is there's so much happening and people are taking those social issues into the workplace. And if leadership is not creating an environment for them to actually talk about this stuff, that's another disruption that causes people to actually be frustrated with their job, their work environment, and ultimately move on to something else. And hope that it'll be better somewhere else as well. That's a big point. I almost feel like that's a whole other area. You probably have a team on that, but we'll come back to that point though. Philly, let me move on to you. You're in tech. We've seen nothing but digital work in the last two years with a variety of experiences, right? I mean, you know, I'm very happy about being enabled to work wherever I want to. Some people aren't. Some people don't have access. How do you see the landscape? What's going to stay with us over the last two years? What's going to change? I think tech and digital have really transformed what we've been doing here in the past couple of years. What we see is the skilling approach. What you can do with your skills has changed completely. The duration of skills has reduced. What used to be 10, 15 years is now just five years. And tech really enables all of us to re-skill at speed. And that's where we see a huge benefit. There's a second benefit where the accessibility is massive. And there we have digital platforms, Coursera being a phenomenal example of that, available in many places which were not previously available. And there, of course, you combine with content. If you have the right content, you can make a huge impact. And the third we see is there's not just digital skills that are critical, but there's also skills which have always been of value, communication or human connect. And there's ways to do both of these. So partial in-person, partial digital. This is becoming the new landscape. And we are seeing tremendous velocity, as Bob was mentioning, and how individuals want to learn. If they learn faster, they can see bigger impact for themselves in what they're doing. It's in digital jobs, but it's in all walks of life. And that's really the impact we see. We see this continuing for some time. Okay, I'm going to ask you to tease out some of the best practices of blending human and digital in just a minute. But, Maryam, let me move on to you. You're teaching girls all over the world how to code. You started in the UK, but you're in, how many countries now? 70. 70. Okay. They're all using the same platform. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about how that works and how you got started with this mission. Absolutely. I mean, first of all, I'm extremely honored to be in this room. Again, it shows that we are making progress across the world because I think for me to sit here today thanks to the Sadia Zahidi and her team is because we are talking inclusion. It means that I can represent the voice of the marginalized communities all across the world. So I'm extremely honored. It's always a joy for me to participate on the risk-killing platform and talk about it. I think the reason why I do what I do is because I'm extremely frustrated with infrastructure, content, also connectivity for girls who are coming from marginalized communities all across the world. From Senegal to Mombasa, they don't have access. And I think what COVID-19 has showed is the fact that the world is not equal. And girls are teenagers, teenage pregnancy, for example, extremely high during COVID-19, mental health for young girls and boys. You know, I work in the refugee camps, thank the World Economic Forum. You know, I've been working in Kakumar refugee camp in Kenya where they are the first girls, first refugee girls to learn how to code because we young global leaders took our time to go there. And I think what I do is try to tell the world that we can sit here at Davos today, talk about innovation, ESGs, and inclusion in diversity as much as we like. But if we don't have girls using platforms and making sure the platform is easy to be accessible, also, you know, making sure that when we give access, we give access meaningfully. That's why we're very proud to have partnered with Coursera in 2020 at Davos to make sure that their platform is being used, but it's not enough. The last mile of education is not being funded. That's what I'm trying to address right now. But the other thing is the fragmented education for boys and girls all across the world, from Asia to Africa, Middle East, everywhere. We expect Bob to hire them, but we're not giving them the skills. And skills equal money. We are right now in a time where it's absolutely critical. I didn't go to school. Somebody like me was not supposed to be in this room because I learned my alphabet when I was 16 years old in a local library in Guilford. I learned how to code seven coding languages in two years. I'm a full-stack developer. I can sit down and build an app for you right now because someone invested in my library in Guilford. So I think the point I'm trying to make, if we're going to talk about digital skills and re-skilling people, make sure that data, as Sadia just shows, go up by 2030, we need to meaningfully give people access, but invest in the last mile of education. So girls like me can sit down here in 2030 and share their stories. Awesome. I love that. Okay, Jeff, you've got a little bit of a hard act to follow here, but you've worked with Mariam and you've worked with many other educators. What lessons do you take from the last couple of years? How do we make sure that we build on all this digital learning that's happened and not lose it? There's a lot of consternation out there. Clearly, Clouse actually last night at the dinner said, the world has never faced this array of challenges all at the same time, I mean, from pandemics to wars to food crises and growing inequality. So it's easy to be a little despondent, but what we're talking about here is actual progress, actual progress. It's not just the idea of what needs to be done, things are getting done. And I think the way that this has been unlocked, I mean, the World Economic Forum talks about five drivers of social mobility, technology, education, healthcare, jobs and institutions. And when I look at those five, I see them as a system. And what happened during the pandemic is that technology really unlocked the possibility that people could continue to learn even as 1.6 billion had their campuses closed. So a huge infusion of people practicing and being introduced to online learning. And it's a platform. And I think, Amari, on what you said, I think it's really important. Platforms, it's a model that is very powerful because a platform is something, whether it's Coursera or Skillsoft or any other platform, what it allows is for a collection of institutions or individuals to supply solutions to problems that they've never even become aware of. People are using Coursera to solve problems we don't know exist. And that's the greatest thing about it is the ability to have many institutions supply important content with partner with institutions because it is a last-mile piece as well. It's the content plus the institutional support that allows people to have access to learning and to create value and solve problems that the world needs solved. So we look at the learning piece and we say technology has opened up access to learning in a way that wasn't previously possible. And with remote and hybrid work, which I think is a second major permanent shift from the pandemic, it's not every job and it's not immediate. But many, many jobs, including the highest paid, most flexible jobs, which often can be done remotely, are going to be the ones that create new opportunities for people because of remote work. So if technology has allowed anyone anywhere greater chance of being able to learn, we say skills pay the bills. You said skills earn money. I mean if people have access to learn the skills and then if those skills can be translated into economic opportunity because jobs become more available to people in regions where there have not historically been job opportunities, we have the possibility through institutional collaboration to both skill and create economic opportunity for populations who never had access to either one of those and it's happening. So I'm very optimistic. I mean there's a lot of tough things out there, but we are actually seeing real progress being made and we see that we see that I think we seeing the patterns of the solution and it's happening. Okay, I'm going to come back to you in a minute on the hybrid point, but Nigel, I want to bring you in. You're in a very unique position. You're Prime Minister of Tunisia, but you've held many senior positions in education. The conversation about national competitiveness is always about education and skills. It's always about how can we train a 21st century workforce. Every country has that conversation. So what lessons can you share from Tunisia's experience? Thank you for giving me the opportunity to to talk about the Tunisian experience and first of all, I would like to tell you that in my government we have eight female ministers and the ministers of finance, Mrs. Siham is here, the minister of energy, of industry, of mining, of trade, culture and family and all of us and myself, we are proud of the Tunisian education system. Since our independence, Tunisia has always and continues to put its compass on education and our education system provided opportunities for all Tunisians to rise the social lift and more importantly, it provided equal opportunities for girls and boys and the credo was and is nobody behind. So this strategic choice continues today and despite huge pressure on our public finances and Tunisia still ranks first globally in terms of government funding by pupil and secondary education as per percentage of GDP per capita and we ranked third on the list of countries with high numbers of women working in science and one of the well-advanced countries in terms of women's rights. I would like to say here that the world, as you all know, is transforming deeply with global megatrends such as the rising rule of technology, climate change, demographic shifts, urbanization and globalization of value change and the education systems are requested to respond to emerging and future needs and the picture appears to be contrasting but the challenges are tremendous. I would like to say here that on the one hand we in Tunisia do well globally in terms of availability and quality of human resources. We rank eight in education overall and 35 in human capital and research according to the Global Innovation Index. We are also ranked second globally in the percentage of graduating STEM in science, technology, engineering and math and on the other hand we have to drastically improve the impact of our education research and innovation in transforming knowledge into economic value and social fair. In short, we produce good knowledge but unfortunately we absorb little of it. We produce good doctors, engineers and scientists but these talents are living the country and the brain drain is taking a very concerning magnitude. One third of our engineers live the country, open graduation and the rates are more concerning in areas such as ICT where entire cohorts of freshly graduates are living the country. This is a net loss of the investment and moreover a big shortfall for the countries need to achieve prosperity for its people and in our developing countries not only the skilling is needed but also retaining the skill and workforce is of critical importance. This is what I would like to say here. Okay great thank you. All right well that's a good sort of scene setting. Let me come back around and follow up on some of the points that you all have made and kind of connect some of them. Bob you talked about ESG and skilling being a part of ESG which is is everywhere. I mean I feel like that is part of almost every conversation that we're having this week in Davos and certainly everything I'm writing about. Is the skilling part harder than other parts of ESG and what do employees, what do stakeholders, what do customers expect from you guys in that area? How is it evolving? So I don't think it's any harder. It's just another techno or tactical skill that has to be addressed. So the question comes back to and I want to go to where Maryam and Jeff went in particular which is how do you make sure people have the ability to connect in and avail themselves to those learning opportunities to enable lifelong learning? Number one. Number two the quality of the education no matter where it may come from education systems at the corporate level or in any other digital format or virtual format has to be of sufficient quality to enable a changed behavior and that changed behavior then enables then an opportunity from an economic perspective personal economics as well as otherwise. The third place that's got to be done here though is you've got to continue to ensure that there's entrepreneurship coming out of that innovation new job creation etc and this goes to Saudi's point in terms of where that economic opportunity is. Yeah and so encouraging that is another systemic issue otherwise you'll have refugees leaving where our citizens of countries for example in Tunisia are saying okay yeah I've got to move elsewhere where's the opportunity going to be for me and we're going to see that a lot more especially in Eastern Europe as you look at the Russia-Ukrain situation right now and the last point I would say is how do you actually empower the youth to not necessarily be just the beneficiaries of this but actually drive this own this and enable this and as we step back and Miriam knows this Jeff knows this I'm part of an organization called Generation Unlimited which is under UNICEF and the UN where we're focused on those four things and the reason we're focused on that is not to take a great example that Miriam has but actually figure out how do you scale it because to Jeff's point we're really seeing a tremendous amount of entrepreneurship and innovation and optimism but it's not fast enough it's not big enough yet we got to scale as fast as we possibly can. I'm curious if any of you have seen an idea or are taking part in an idea that is scaling you know that you that you can see what what can we learn what are the what's the silver thread. I'll happily pick it up here so one of the things that this organization Gen U is doing is in India right now that connection point has actually enabled itself to connect to 300 million people so now we're talking real numbers in terms of how do you actually get those that are underprivileged etc that are not equipped you got to connect them and then send them to lean into that opportunity and make it easy and available to them to actually take advantage of that and what's going on and the lesson learned becomes this it becomes a public private youth partnership to get everybody aligned to actually get people equipped to avail themselves to it leveraging it and benefiting from it and it's the output that comes from that not the connectivity but the output. Maryam you're nodding. I think this week you will hear quite a lot about the shared humanity and you hear that everywhere in rooms and I think it takes some time kindness compassion and empathy to really think about these people you have to go to Kakumarofishi camp to realize the camp has been there for 32 years 258,000 people you know will be useless to the United Kingdom to Germany to all these countries because they don't have the skills and the time is so critical for us to change our mindset in the way we give people but don't give them because we feel sorry for them because we are giving them because coding for example you know make economic sense you know right now Google is for example hiring people in London they paying them $100,000 a year a 25 years old young man what I'm trying to do here I'm building the world's largest pipeline of coders in the world in 2030 you'll come back to me and say Lady Maryam I would like to have 100 Java coders I will give them to you but if you don't invest now 2030 don't ask me for my Java coders because I will not give them to you and so we need to really start thinking economics and how job creations create work in Rwanda you know they have a Rwanda coding academy and you have young boys who are so smart and girls who are coding I mean they really building the really amazing applications and solutions but the world don't know about this and for me to sit here to share these stories they're real stories but the refugees we must include the refugees in everything we do that are smart people they really don't know they know how to do things we need to give them the jobs give them the opportunity the content the infrastructure and the really really thing that everyone is struggling right now is connectivity it's not everyone who's got Wi-Fi it's not everyone who can go and connect to the Wi-Fi so we really need to look into our heart again and and think about what can we do to take care of our people because as I said to my president if you don't take care of people they will take care of you. Jeff how do you go about getting you know across all your platforms getting the services to people who don't have connectivity I mean where do you you know who are you working with tell us the process. Yeah the a lot of it has to do with institutional collaboration just quickly on the speed and scale piece we have seen extraordinary need arise quickly and you know pretty amazing scale the in 2020 when the pandemic broke out UNESCO said in April about 1.6 billion students had their campuses closed we collaborated with 3000 universities in seven months 3000 universities had 3 million students take 30 million courses in seven months so this so the lesson is work with institutions who have access to populations in need and supplement that with fundamental connectivity on the question of and by the way just in terms of what has happened recently with the Ukrainian crisis the Ministry of Education contacted us they said we have a number of displaced students now and can can we somehow provide continuity of learning within 30 days we were live with 135 universities and now 10 000 students have logged 30 000 courses in 30 days so isn't we really are seeing the patterns of incredible speed and scale and then the final thing I'll just say with respect to connectivity it is essential when when people ask me like what role must governments play in trying to bridge inequality gaps as with water and electricity and and good sanitation fundamental primary education is critical for individuals who don't have the basic literacy and numeracy they're going to be left further and further behind by those that do because you cannot avail yourself of these types of platforms if you don't have the fundamental knowledge and skills to do it when you're young kind of K through 12 so I say investing K through 12 and then on the connectivity side not only is learning opportunity accessible through technology job opportunities increasingly are accessible through technology so if you don't have connectivity you are starving both the access to the skill development and the access to the economic opportunity that's a problem that governments need to solve and I think they can do with telecom providers zero based rating where certain websites you go to your telecom operators and say if you want to provide telecom service mobile service in our country you know there's going to be no data fee if our people access these educational based sites we see a number of countries doing this and then the the final thing I'll just mention is it's none either or we have a number of countries in the Middle East and Latin America around the world where there's not continuous access to broadband but there's intermittent access to broadband there's not continuous access to power but there's intermittent access to power if you can charge a mobile device long enough for it to run for an hour or two and if you get to a hotspot where you can download courses yeah you can work offline pretty much anywhere go through the courses do your assessments and when you get back to a hotspot you can sync it back up so you at least provide and I think Columbia has done an excellent job of this provide public hotspots where people you know hopefully not too far from where people are located where you can at least have intermittent access to the internet does not have to be all the time and with data plans it's pretty expensive wi-fi is really valuable backbones to public wi-fi hotspots is very valuable in Nigeria 30% of monthly expected of average income is is is the is required to buy two gigabytes of data last time I checked this was like a couple years ago it could be very expensive to buy data with with lower disposable income and so I think it's really important to have these public wi-fi hotspots really interesting I mean everything that you all are saying is you're kind of getting at the edges of basically a fundamental reshaping of the educational system but also it seems like much closer ties between education and business in some ways so I'm curious maybe just to get thoughts from the whole group about how you see what has happened over the last two years shifting k through 12 shifting whether we are going to continue to see four-year colleges or whether we're going to see more of these sort of six in four programs where you know you get an associates and then you work or or are we going to see just kind of hybrid forever and what is that going to look like or credentials because so leil as you pointed out you know the the skills that you need are changing very quickly so do we need just a kind of pot of credentials that you add on maybe you can start it's it's a so the the points you made a vast array of changes that are going on I think first what we had as education I don't think is disappearing but there is tremendous amounts that is being added on and so the overall number of people that can access the skill-based training is expanding what we are seeing is a lot of recruitment is focused more on skills than simply education but it's not to say that education in the traditional sense is disappearing we enhancing it massively now and here everything that we've seen with online learning we find a value in expanding what is available but we also find tremendous need for traditional connected learning because there is a value in that social interaction of learning that we see as well and what people are now figuring out is what is the most efficient way what is the most scalable way of doing both so we had a bit of with what we saw in the last two years the pendulum shifting almost entirely to digital and now we're figuring out there's obviously things lacking if it's only digital and there we see the future developing so for us you know when we see graduates joining a company we can see with online learning that some of the team building skills have been missed out on a couple years so we sort of and over compensating for that in in the shorter term to make that happen but having said that the overall education that's available now between traditional skills online in person is making sure that more and more people have access to it and that's phenomenal Nausala would you like to jump in on this question at all yeah of course um let me tell you that we in Tunisia sorry for focusing on our experience in Tunisia we have experienced online learning we have one that you need in university virtual university and since 20 years and we are developing many of spooks mooks for developing life skills language skills and we have linked it with the certification of skills this is very important for our of our youth to to have an to have a job and and we have many of very nice pepits especially in young universities and they have developed mooks and spooks for improving language like french in collaboration with your french universities and many of for instance about 600 engineer graduates in chinese universities are are attending the the mooks and the spooks in in a small university in tunisia and this is we are very proud of that we have very nice pepits in tunisia nowadays according and in a relation with online education that's interesting so it's education online education is becoming an export yeah of course we can generate resources with that and we need generation of resources and if you permit i would like to to take to tell you more about our priority and how we prioritize our our education in in tunisia according according all the the financial difficulties that we are challenging nowadays and our dilemma is following in in times of economic difficulties while the education is the top priorities and why we spend a lot of on education the question is how to dedicate more resources to reforms that are not quick wins yeah how to keep investment in basic education at and at the same time invest more in lifelong learning and the skilling but the transformation is inevitable and as for us the the path the path is clear we are continuing to invest massively in in education and mainly to move into high high value added segment in select economics priority sectors with a target to to promote growth and employment for for everybody and nobody behind as i told you before lovely um bob you had a point i think in the mirror do the entire education system is going through a number of different shifts to your question and i want to point out four really quickly number one you've got the concept of lifelong learning being more accepted by society at large and that goes to the government as much as it goes to the corporate so this public private partnership is really important number two you have business that i think because of the demands from an esg perspective are actually much more engaged on willingness to help with the connectivity the quality and the ultimate education so you see that benefit and you've got a couple like coserra with jeff and what i described microsoft is another great example where they have something called passport to earnings which connects the world in terms of what's happening with that connectivity or even without that connectivity the third thing that's important is every institution now is looking at how do i help with skills enhancement and yes certification or accreditation against those skills and that's going to be really important but what's going to be needed is we got to have mobility of those credentials move from place to place to place yeah because if celil actually says okay i'm going to only hire people that have my credentials and i'm going to only hire people that have my credentials we'll never have the economic upside that's um uh sadi talked about earlier today and last but not least is this concept of prioritization now with the education system and being top of mind that it's a crowded agenda it's where you started and unless we actually bake that into everything we're doing we're going to miss the opportunity if you look at the amount of public and private partnership economic contributions that have gone into the education system it's a minuscule in the last two and a half years to what it needs to be and obviously all of that went to covid and pandemic and everything else but actually there was some upside here if a little bit more was provided in we'd actually get that scalability and ultimately that connectivity that sadi talked about we first opened up the session mariam do you want to make a comment absolutely i'm just picking up what the prime minister said you know we need to think about certification as a dignity when young girls have certifications they feel so proud of themselves and they really like you know you can see this on their faces they're like oh i got this certificate i've got this certificate so i think again we need to always think about the 75 million young people who are in education but don't have jobs right now and so we need to also change our mindset in saying what can we do to give them access to Coursera at i am the code what we have done we get we know we have a 12 weeks blended curriculum where the because of the fragmented education these young people have been having for so many years we made it structured so they can go through coding skills and they go to life skills and leadership skills they learn really something very very practical and at the end of the 12 weeks you know they can start getting jobs or you can really see this i think what i'm calling on on again i'll share humanity but when we're designing solutions when we are creating these platforms we need to think about people at the end the refugee girls i work with over 7 000 right now in kakuma they are so proud of themselves because they can get certification all of that need to be talked about this week then when we go back into our offices design things that are simple that can be used offline online and make sure that you know is understandable uh you know it's dignified and we can help people ultimately get jobs okay we've got about 15 minutes left so i think i'd like to open and up to the floor now for questions and we already have a bunch so um if we can get some mics here and then over there got one coming here you hi uh ronnie shruwala i'm grad india um great conversation everyone just two questions i think we've been talking a lot about the need and bob you've lifeline the scope exactly of how large and the impact can be but do we all see the challenge that actually the actual consumer the person really needs to change their lives haven't yet actually found the sense of urgency to do that and what in our ecosystem that we're creating where the soul is willing the body is willing but from that point of view so if you run one of the largest it companies in the world but yet uh you still also run one of the largest training campuses in the world because the people you get in still you feel have not on their own up skilled so that was just one question of how are we going to be able to create the sense of urgency to actually meet that because the two parts have to meet and i think the second one for everyone here because we've heard a lot about lifelong learning is the importance of soft skills because i think if we're just going to conquer skills over the next 10 years and we know that 50 percent of all change is going to happen through soft skills what's our thought and process it's a great great point who wants to grab that i'll start with this maybe and uh bob can join in so thanks ronnie i think you you have tremendous experience in this area with what you've created what we see on the urgency is absolutely appropriate what you describe uh there's a set of people who have a tremendous urgency but a large number of people don't have it and part of it is creating a certain level of excitement and fun with the content in addition to depth in the content so what we do for example at in our university set up in my sort and we also have an online platform within the company is to make sure that that ability to learn in that engage manner comes about uh there is definitely an interest that we see because uh in our own small context people immediately jump on to projects when they finish some internal certifications and there's a value to that but the urgency certainly needs to be pushed more and we need to think of how it can be done on the soft skills i'll come back with bob go ahead yeah the um the point i want to pick on is that we've got to actually segment the populations of the world that need help in different ways to your point some of who's employed today and i'm going to use pwc as an example you want them to lean more into the upskilling that's necessary and you've got to make it interesting and exciting enough for them to want to lean into those opportunities and the way we thought about it we created a program called new world new skills where we said look if you're going to lean in because you're all worried about job security if you're going to lean into that opportunity we're not going to guarantee you a job but i am going to increase the probability that you're going to be employable at pwc or anywhere else and it's going to be citizen led meeting our employees not top down bottom up and this way take away the passive resistance uh because anytime something's built at the center and forced on people human behavior such that you're not going to get that upside but let's go to the other side of the equation which you've got to take some of the walls out of the system so those that are underprivileged in various parts of the world there may be a family that says my daughter should be staying home or getting married at a really early age and kenley doesn't have availability and shouldn't go to school or avail themselves through those online courses so we've actually got to knock that wall down which actually doesn't go to the individual it goes to the surrounding environment that's around them that we got to attack and say here's the opportunity so there's a whole cascading of communication that has to happen to create the incentive for people to want to do this on a going forward basis and to your latter point on soft skills you have to look at the totality of this right there's digital skills which you talked a lot about there's esg skills that are going to be needed as we transform work going forward the softer skills are going to enable this to happen and it goes a little bit to where i opened up one of the other things that's going to be needed is the soft skills to enable that environment to have conversations around social issues and if we don't have the eq to actually have those conversations trust me people have the conversations at home you're going to want to have them at work as well and we got leadership that's going to need to actually equip for that to happen and we're ill equipped to have that happen a lot of our survey data actually tells us that probably 70 percent of the organizations today are not allowing for those conversations to happen in their organizations which is another negative to the willingness to actually be employed by that organization as well boy i'd love to hear you at some point endavas on on that conversation and and some of the things you've seen um we have mike over here yep camila camila from global shapers community basically you are talking about non-formal non-formal informal education um you're talking about certificates but this small business is the major responsible for jobs for like youth and they don't recognize this though informal and non-formal certification so how uh what the way to make the government recognize those and the company is also because if we if we are like re-skilling people uh the employee the employers don't recognize the certificates though doesn't work you know that's a great question i want to actually add in their beat to that and Jeff if you want to jump in something i noticed even in the formal um education processes that are public and private i'm thinking about like the ibm p-tech schools or you know it's not it's not a one size fits all um there are a lot of companies doing different things sometimes the companies don't know each other's process so how do we get to a more centralized place while still allowing some flexibility i think it gets to what salil was talking about um i'd say traditionally formal education has been almost the only type of a system and credential recognized so if you have a credential from the formal education system then you get certain you know opportunities and if you don't then you don't a lot of people talk about oh is the degree dead is it micro credentials yeah we sort of see a hybrid everything um we have at corsera we work with universities uh interestingly universities create content but industry also creates content universities consume the content and also industry consumes the content we have companies like uh like uh implicit pwc etc using university content to upskill their employees at the same time we have universities well nmyms university in india is a great example they offer a b-tech a batches of technology in that curriculum they have integrated industry content for credit where when you graduate you get a b-tech degree with honors in data science and that honors track is actually coming from industry content provided on a platform you know like in this case corsera but again it doesn't have to be corsera there are other platforms so the ability to have hybrid learning online and on campus is here to stay the ability to have hybrid credentials is it a college degree or is it a microcredential it's both you literally graduate with a college degree and a microcredential and you actually got credit towards your college degree by doing that industry credential and then at work you're upskilling taking courses from you know algorithms from princeton it is it is really blending together and i think a spectacular way and i think what's going to happen is individuals over the course of their lives will build a portfolio of credentials which will be valued for different reasons you might have a bachelor's degree that says something about your understanding of of of liberal arts and and sort of human sort of history and what it means to be a human and you might have a cfa which is a certified financial analyst which means you understand certain things about finance and investing and then you might have a professional certificate from IBM and artificial intelligence and that's all part of your portfolio credentials that say to an employer these are the things that i know and if you think that that's valuable you know please hire me or give me a chance to accelerate my career i love that idea but i think she makes a great point on on certifications because many not many government recognize some of the certifications especially if you are a refugee or living in urban kenya or you know really tough places because you have accumulated so many certifications and if you don't show something tangible you're not going to get jobs i think also is a policy makers the digital the minister of technology in in in countries to actually you know make this a mandatory thing like kenya right now they've made coding compulsory the government of kenya has made coding compulsory rwanda is the same so many countries are making technology and now you can have access to corsa courses i mean over 197 you know universities are inside corsa for young girl to have a you know a certificate from mit is a big deal for her and her family you know in a sitting in in mombasa so i think we also need to ask government to recognize this lifelong learning certificates so they don't you know stop the you know the people who are learning you know in their own time there were two things that were embedded in your question one was the sort of credentialing and the recognition of that the weft actually has an initiative under way to actually think about what are the sectors and what are the skills that are needed in that sectors and then can we actually connect the dots with governments to actually recognize those kind of skillsets that are necessary what's the name that actually i don't i can't remember the name so actually it's um uh saudi and the team are actually working this right now but what was also embedded in your question was actually the importance of the small and medium-sized enterprises right and let's not forget that because government actually working with business has to create the entrepreneurial mindset to create the jobs on the other side because if we do a great job of getting the billion people skilled and if there's no jobs you're going to have more social unrest than we have today so let's not forget this is a supply and a demand issue that we actually have to be focusing on both of those and government business have a role to play on that entrepreneurial job creation side as well awesome there was a gentleman with a question up in front and then we'll take one over here thank you excellent insights this morning thank you for that my name is the banker trihan i am also represent the global shapers community my question is while there's a lot of conversation around skilling and education for people who are in some format in formal sector of education and training what about the people who are unaccounted for how do we extend education and skilling to them just to put things in perspective in india alone about 175 million people are unaccounted for they're not in education they're not in training they're not in jobs how do we extend education and skill initiatives to them thank you great question who wants to grab that i mean i can i can that's a very good point that's a very good question um that's what i've been fighting for for how many years now you are right the last mile of education we must invest in that right now we're all comfortable in in creating platforms and giving it to the people who look like us and and you know universities and communities but when you go to places where you know there is no infrastructure meaning it's a building connectivity uh you know train the trainers all of that you know it will be part of our share humanity i've been saying the whole morning so again it's our job to redesign what we are trying to do here the way to reach out to those girls is me traveling you know seven seven hours from london to Nairobi getting into the refugee camp talking to all the schools and and you need to train the teachers on the ground because the refugee girls you know they may end up getting married if we don't intervene so i'm doing an intervention a really critical intervention with the unhr who are really trying to do their best but these refugees when they want to resettle in america in london you know unless they are useful to the government of those countries they will not resettle they will stay in detention centers you know i've been to detention centers all across the world it's awful it's absolutely horrible to sit in detention center for six months nine months one year two years waiting for somebody to come and rescue you no one is coming right nobody's coming so i think that's why we need to really think about the last mile of education even the Coursera platform is is answering the needs how can we make it offline online how can we make it different languages uh for these people to have access to it but also we need to take the plane or we need to go to the people technology must go to the people it must not come to us we need to go and give it to the young girls and boys all across the world and right now it's absolutely urgent it's so urgent for us to go out there because the data we are working towards right now for me i will not be satisfied in 2030 until you know all of my girls are included in this data because this death will be inaccurate in 2030 if we have not included the left to behind and the missing millions you just mentioned okay final question here hi i'm a global shaper from japan my name is atoka i'm a founder of a liberal arts summer program in japan and so i'm wondering so in this continuously changing and evolving society i believe that what we learned today can already be considered outdated in a few years and so in that in that in that case how do you manage to provide education or education platforms that doesn't just that doesn't just educate or educate the people to be equipped for the now but to be equipped for the future so leil do you have heard bob or sorry jeff go ahead maybe i'll start off jeff you know i think critical critical point that you mentioned we clearly see that what was learned in the past which was with us for say 10 15 years today the duration is much shorter so one of the things which i think are important to learn as as students and all through life is really the ability to learn the thing that's critical is to realize that whatever you learn today is going to change and that's not something which many students in school at least when we were in school was was that evident it was evident that we had to learn what was around us but not to learn how to learn ongoing and that's a little bit of a mindset change which needs to come into more school level thinking because then people are ready to to do this it's a bit of a shock because you suddenly realize when you're in the in the work environment that literally in five seven years you are not at the right skill level and that that's not something that people are used to so it's almost critical to internalize that you really need to learn how to learn on an ongoing basis okay and i i totally agree with that the the other thing i would encourage you to think about is what you might think of as the half-life of certain knowledge and skills there are certain things that i learned a long time ago when i was in college in high school that haven't changed you know physics has changed a bit but the basics of physics have not changed the basis of biology have not changed mathematics guess what most mathematics is not changing it's very important to know mathematics and statistics so i would i would a lot of liberal arts understand what it means to be a human it's changing a bit because our context is changing but there are a lot of things that are very durable and they don't need to change all the time and i would i think a lot of traditional systems that maybe aren't so agile should focus on those more durable transferable skills and complement it with a higher velocity training platform for the tools that change fast the techniques that change fast a lot of the ways that people team and technology is changing fast and complement those two things together i really think that's also a hybrid kind of answer there are things that are durable and there are things that have a very high rate of obsolescence try to have different mechanisms to bring those to your students i just want to add the at the world academy at the risk killing platform we have something called the taxonomy of education i would recommend you go and have a look at that it's really comprehensive report we've done a couple of years ago last year it's really fantastic because you can see what's happening today what's happening in the next couple of years and we would love to you know hear from you as a shape or community if you can help us shape this because you know for me to sit here as a coder i'm 47 years old maybe in about in 50s in 2030 it'll be totally different so please have a look at the taxonomy of you know of the education we have at the risk killing platform it's really fantastic okay well we are at time i feel like we could have gone on several more hours in this conversation but you know my takeaway is in challenge opportunity you know i mean i can already see a lot of brainstorming going on between our panelists and the audience um and within the conversation we've had today so thanks for sharing thank you for being here and i'm sure we're going to be talking again about reskilling next year at delvos as well