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Opportunity Marketplaces: Aligning Workforce Investment and Value Creation—Findings from the 2020 Future of the Workforce Global Executive Study and Research Project by Michael Schrage, Jeff Schwartz, David Kiron, Robin Jones, and Natasha Buckley Many leaders are rethinking how they value and invest in their workforces. Across the business landscape, corporate leaders are seeking to develop more flexible, adaptive, and valuable workers. Based on a survey of nearly 3,900 respondents and 18 executive interviews, the authors found that the most effective approaches to achieving a
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higher-value workforce have a common core: opportunity. Targeted investment in opportunity is fast becoming the central organizing principle for making more people more valuable in more organizations. The multiple interviews identify the design of opportunity marketplaces as perhaps
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the key leadership challenge for most organizations seeking to ethically maximize human capital returns. Schneider Electric, a global energy management company, has hired a vice president of talent digitization, who’s job is to “help generate revenues by launching technologies that ensure employees
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