Global Talent Summit 2022

THE OTHER GREATS REINVENTION, RETHINK, RESHUFFLE, RENEGOTIATION

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THANK YOU

THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS & SPONSORS FOR THEIR SUPPORT FOR THE GLOBAL TALENT SUMMIT 2022 & THE WORLD IN 2050.

CO-HOSTS

PARTNERS & SPONSORS

CONTENTS

WELCOME NOTE

BY ANA C. ROLD AND KELLY RYAN BAILEY

ESSAYS & FEATURES

THE OLD WORKPLACE IS GONE. WHAT’S A BOARD TO DO?

BY JIM CLIFTON AND CHAD HOLLIDAY

SKILLS FOR THE PRESENT, NOT THE FUTURE BY BEN NELSON

SHIFT FROM DEGREES TO SKILLS BY KELLY RYAN BAILEY

20

WHY EDUCATION MUST PIVOT TOWARDS SKILLS BY ALLYSON BERRI

WILL COVID-19 REMOVE BARRIERS TO REMOTE WORK? BY ALLYSON BERRI

POST-PANDEMIC URBAN PLANNING BY ALLYSON BERRI

LEARNINGS

GLOBAL TALENT SUMMIT POST-PANDEMIC LESSONS BY WINONA ROYLANCE

FLATLAND: COMPETING FOR TALENT IN A GLOBAL VIRTUAL WORK ENVIRONMENT

MINDSETS OVER SKILLSETS: THE SHIFTING NATURE OF PROFESSIONAL READINESS

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: THE ROLE OF URBAN CENTERS FOR AN ALL-REMOTE WORKFORCE

SCALING THE PARENTAL WALL: THE EVOLVING ROLE OF EMPLOYERS IN DEALING WITH THE NEEDS OF WORKING PARENTS

SPECIAL REPORT LEAPFROG WITH LEARNCARD BY SCOTT MEYER

WELCOME

BY ANA ROLD & KELLY BAILEY

Adecade ago, in an article for the G20 Summit magazine (produced by Diplomatic Courier), Kris Gopalakrishnan, CoChairman of Infosys wrote that businesses and governments across the world were just beginning to come to terms with the new reality of then post-financial crisis era. Unlike previ ous crises, success would be determined not only by the availability of financial capital but increasingly, human capital. This global war for talent involved three key issues: changing demographic profiles, technol ogy development and consequent productivity increase, and skill gaps and demand-supply mismatches. Mr. Gopalakrishnan’s predictions at the Los Cabos Summit in 2012 were spot on. Today, we are dealing with a paradox: 200 million people unemployed worldwide—40 million in the advanced economies and 75 million of which are youth—and global companies still have millions of unfilled positions.

So relevant were his findings that they inspired our first Global Talent Summit. In 2013 we gathered at the National Press Club where business and industry leaders, civil society, media personalities, top diplo mats, and other stakeholders debated the future of jobs and education. The conversations reverberated at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos a week later, and globally with over 88 million media engagements.

Fast forward to today, in the post-pandemic reality of the Great Res ignation, Work from Home, Quiet Quitting, etc. we’re seeing a massive shift to the Next Normal. We convened four mini-summits virtually during the pandemic, across all time zones around the world and we learned a universal truth: the future had arrived.

The future is now and to thrive in a rapidly evolving, technology-focused world, job seekers must not only possess strong skills in areas such as lan guage arts, mathematics, and science, but also skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, persistence, collaboration, and curiosity. Where are we attaining these critical employability skills? Our answer is everywhere.

This year’s summit’s brain trust, which includes our speakers and del egates, are endeavoring to answer that question with nuance and thoughtfulness and we are particularly proud to bring our partners, friends, and collaborators together for the ninth edition and the first in person Global Talent Summit post-pandemic.

The essays compiled in this anthology reflect learnings from our key contributors as well as key takeaways from previous editions of Global Talent Summit. We hope you find them useful and will reach out to us if you wish to contribute to a future edition. Thank you for being a part of this year’s Global Talent Summit. We look forward to learning and creating together.

THE OLD WORKPLACE IS GONE.

WHAT’S A BOARD TO DO?

BY JIM CLIFTON AND CHAD HOLLIDAY

There are 125 million full-time employees in the United States. Of them, 56% tell Gallup they can do their office jobs remotely—so, 70 million U.S. workers say they can work from home (WFH).

Of these, 30% say they don’t want to come into the office any more and prefer fully remote, 60% say they want a hybrid ar rangement, and only 10% prefer to work fully on-site.

A new will of the world has emerged—one that we couldn’t have imagined the day before the pandemic.

Who knew we would all wake up the same morning in one global Zoom conversation? And so far, it sort of works.

What are you going to do about this new will as a board mem ber? How you bring employees back to the office is closely con nected to very large amounts of money that go beyond expensive office space.

You might say figuring out how to bring employees back is a job for the CEO and management team, not the board. We see this as a major strategic decision that should be implemented by the management team but probed and tested by the board.

A board member’s job is to ask the right questions to support the CEO in making the final decision. For example: Have we lost mission-critical people to other companies because of our WFH policies? Why? Do our customers have a preference regarding our WFH approach, or do they just care about the results?

Another critical question: How have we developed our managers to be effective in a WFH or hybrid environment? Right now, man agers don’t know what to do and are accumulating dangerous levels of stress and subsequent burnout (real mental health issues).

According to Gallup’s recent U.S. panel research, managers are more miserable at work than their employees. Your team lead ers have likely never been taught how to manage a much less attached worker.

Worldwide productivity is on the line, especially because your customer connections run through your workplace. The money players in your company are the customer-facing teams. As goes the quality of those relationships, so goes sales, profit and stock price. The simplest way to say it is that your employ ees know all your customers. Therein lies the new risk.

The risk the board and CEO need to consider is a potential customer retention problem, which will eventually affect stock price far more directly than employee retention.

Respected CEOs are all over the place about how to bring em ployees back. “Come back to normal or you are fired.” Others are saying, “You don’t have to ever come back—fully remote is fine.” There remains an unanswered question in every board room—will giving approval to hybrid and remote employees cause overall productivity to go up or down? That is the question.

Gallup’s answer: If you get it right, productivity can soar.

Have you received this call, “Hey boss, great news—the family and I are going to sell our home in the city and move to the lake house. So cool, my office will be in the boat house.” Then they always say this, “It won’t hurt my productivity at all—I am more productive out here than in the office.”

Your senior executives are moving to the hills, too. Dear CEO, “Mavis and the kids love the environment so much at our Montana place, we are going to live out there much of the year now.”

CEO says, “Have you gone nuts? We need you here in customer sessions.”

When Gallup asked the 70 million U.S. employees why they’d rather not come in anymore, their first response is “the com mute.” Their next answer is it “helps my wellbeing” and the third is “it works better for my family.”

Has your board discussed if you even need people in tall build ings in big cities anymore?

The appeal of working in shiny steel buildings with enchanting lobby water sounds won’t bring employees in anymore. Even tually, this will crush commercial real estate as well as support ing retail shops and cafes.

What if the shift to WFH crushes GDP per capita, America’s ulti mate performance measurement? All because Zoom doesn’t work as well for customer retention and buildouts. So, deal-making can no longer ride on relationships and ideas quite like before.

Have you ever noticed that humor doesn’t come across Zoom? Does it make you wonder what else isn’t coming across—like trust and caring?

On the other hand, GDP per capita—the sum of all the stuff we make and sell each other—has largely been in deceleration for 50 years. So, it isn’t like, “We have to get back to what works.” We would argue, along with other experts, that America has needed transformational workplace change for 50 years.

Doesn’t it seem that our American management system was already broken if 90% of our 70 million office workers say they don’t want to come back to the office full time? Whether it’s, “I want out and I am never coming back to that rat race again” or, “I am dropping off the grid—forever.”

The board and CEO need to know the big potential risks. Productivity, customer retention, wellbeing (mental health) and fast declining relationships that bind the place together with employees and customers—could now all be at high risk.

Here is how to restart your workplace.

Call your board and CEO together and commit to hybrid. Do that or nobody with any talent will ever work for your firm again. It is your biggest current decision and has extraordinary implications for growth, profit and stock price.

Establish on-site days as Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. This is a promise employees make to each other, not a promise they make to management. We need to know which days we are all in together so we can collaborate. We also need to know when we can celebrate successes, meet new colleagues and tell each other customer stories.

Not all employees will be hybrid, of course. Ten percent (10%) of your total office and executive workers want to be on-site Monday through Friday. That’s great. In addition, managers need to know which employees will be fully remote so they can be reviewed and coached differently.

Require a recently discovered silver bullet: The manager must now hold one meaningful conversation per week with each employee—15 to 30 minutes, usually about goals, customers and wellbeing. This prevents employees from morphing into gig workers. Gallup finds this leadership habit magically develops rich, high-performance relationships.

And lastly, aim every workplace decision at the customer rela tionship, which is hard-wired to your employee relationships.

Do these four things well, and a new hybrid workplace will work better than your old one.

*****

About the authors: Jim Clifton is Chairman of Gallup. Chad Holliday is the former chair of DuPont, Bank of America, and Shell.

Editor’s Note: This article was initially published at Gallup.com and is republished here with permission.

SKILLS FOR THE PRESENT, NOT THE FUTURE

BY BEN NELSON

What are the skills needed for the future? This is a question that permeates most conversations or reports about the future of work. There is a general consensus that teaching STEM subjects is not enough but that we should rather focus on STEAM. We even agree that training for technical skills should be complemented by acquiring human (or “soft”) skills. We pour over lists of jobs that are slowly declining and others that are emerging. And we all—in our different fields as educa tors or employers—scramble to identify and train for the skills that the next generation would need to thrive in the future.

All this assumes that we can predict the future, an assumption with scant evidence given our rather terrible track record. Even when scientists predicted the inevitability of a virus like COV ID-19, we failed to predict its societal, economic, and even environmental impact. And worse yet, we failed to prepare for it.

Our hope is that we do not do the same with education, skills, and talent. Rather than trying to predict the jobs and the skills of the future, let us admit that we do not know and have no way of knowing what they will be. A well-circulated claim is that 65% of primary school-aged children will probably end up working in jobs that do not exist. A BBC investigation found that this number is closer to one-third. While this could be an interesting point of discussion, the number that we should be more interested in is that according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder in 2018, 45% of HR managers say they are “un able to fill open positions because they cannot find qualified talent.” In 2018. This is the present—actually the past—not the future. And while some are still debating what 21st century skills should be, a fifth of that century has already passed.

This brings us to the fact that we are actually doing a pretty lousy job of preparing our youth today for the jobs of today.

While we may not know how many jobs will disappear or what kind of jobs will be created in the future, we do know that the overwhelming percentage of jobs have already changed. Our world is and will continue to rapidly evolve, suffer from extreme turbulence, and continue to become more and more interconnected. It requires people (both old and young) to continually learn, unlearn, and relearn. And if we are to have any future, it requires them to do so while also acting for the global good.

So, rather than trying to guess which skills are needed for the future, let us focus on nurturing talent that can thrive in tur bulence, in disruption, and in evolution. Let us train minds for complex systems that will always be bound by unsolvable con straints. Let us focus not on unidimensional teaching decisionmaking but ethical, sustainable decision-taking. Let us train for critical thinking that can discern fact from claim and can argue based on logic rather than assumptions. And let us get comfortable with looking at the world in shades of grey, rather than rigid ideologies.

We still hold discussions about the skills needed for the 21st century, as if this were forward-looking. With a fifth of the century already gone, we better start working urgently on build ing skills which impact society today.

About the author: Ben Nelson is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Minerva, and a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education.

SHIFT FROM DEGREES TO SKILLS

BY KELLY RYAN BAILEY

This year’s Global Talent Summit convened over 70 distin guished luminaries to discuss challenges and solutions re lated to reimagining the future of education and work in the post-pandemic era. Day one was dedicated to skills; quali fying and verifying skills, changing hiring practices to focus on skills, and the proxy of a degree or certification. Although these challenges are not new, they are especially prevalent given the mil lions of individuals in the U.S. and globally that are unemployed and looking for work.

My journey into the world of skills began at a subsidiary of Randstad based in New York City. I placed IT consultants for three major finan cial institutions (Bank of America, BNP Paribas, and Citigroup). My days consisted of meeting with hiring managers to understand their needs and working with my team of recruiters to find people that matched those needs. More often than not, hiring managers would not know what they needed and after getting them to finally com municate a list of hard or technical skills, they would always ask for an advanced degree as well. I learned very quickly that the person with the right mix of technical and human skills—even if they did not have the degree requested or lived in the preferred location—would almost always be hired, and it was my job to convince the hiring manager to interview them and continue the process.

The problem was that after a hiring manager would agree to hire the consultant, the human resources department got involved to finalize the process. That included posting the job to their applicant tracking system and the candidate submitting their resume online. In almost all cases their resume would be rejected because it did not meet the requirements of the job posting. If I had not been involved to inter ject, that candidate would have never made it past the robot.

Fifteen years later and although a few organizations, like IBM and their New Collar program, have made concerted efforts to focus on skills and not degrees, the majority have not innovated. Most em

ployers are still concerned that they cannot find the qualified tal ent needed for their open jobs and that candidates with degrees no longer have the foundational skills they expect. Most people are un sure how to communicate the skills they have gained through a mul titude of experiences. And most educators are struggling to commu nicate what skills they are teaching. What is causing the continued miscommunication between employers, employees, and educators when we all agree that skills-based hiring and learning is the key?

Many believe the skills miscommunication is due to the high cost of time and technology to adopt skills-based hiring and learning prac tices. A coalition of employers, education organizations, and technology providers has recently formed to tackle this challenge. Build ing off of the work of Concentric Sky, Credential Engine, Emsi, and others, the Open Skills Network was formed to accelerate the shift to skills-based hiring and learning by establishing a set of open, ma chine-actionable skills libraries. With coordination from BrightHive, support from Walmart, Western Governors University, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, this coalition also hopes to de velop shared technology and toolsets to eliminate further barriers of implementation of skills-based hiring and learning at scale.

The Learner Employment Records (LER) movement is eliminating the risk of hiring candidates by creating trusted and verified records that can be shared digitally. The Velocity Network Foundation is one such player that has created a nonprofit consortium of global indus try leaders that govern an open source platform. Once again, the focus on open source technology to reduce barriers of implementa tion and enabling large scale adoption across the hiring and learning ecosystem.

Skills-based hiring and learning is not only more efficient and effective, but also removes bias in the hiring process. The Open Skills ini tiative coupled with the continued development of Learner Employ ment Records (LER) gives us hope that we are just on the horizon of a true shift to an equitable hiring and learning environment.

About the author: Kelly Ryan Bailey is the Founder & Host of the ‘Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby’ Podcast and the Co-Founder of World in 2050.

WHY EDUCATION MUST PIVOT TOWARDS SKILLS

BY ALLYSON BERRI

In San Francisco’s bustling Mission District, they can be seen delivering falafel. In hospitals, they can perform MRI analy sis, and on Wall Street, suggest bets and predict economic policy. They can even backflip and stick the landing better than your average professional gymnast. Whether we like it or not, robots are infiltrating every field of the modern work force, leaving education stakeholders scratching their heads about how to best prepare people for a rapidly changing em ployment landscape. One 2013 study estimated that 47% of current jobs will become automated within the next two decades. A 2017 report found that a third of American workers may have to pivot careers because of developments in AI over the next dozen years.

One thing states can do to prepare for what seems to be an uncontrollable onslaught of automation is reshape their edu cation systems. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has present ed a unique opportunity for policymakers and other education stakeholders to rethink every aspect of modern schooling. At the 2020 Global Talent Summit (GTS), a virtual forum where leaders from a variety of industries met to talk about the fu ture of work and education, many asked how K-12 education could better prepare students for the workforce. Again and again, GTS speakers commented on how education should be re-geared to match an emphasis on skills in the workforce.

As many workplaces are changing rapidly with the advent of new technologies such as AI, employers are placing more emphasis on transferrable skills than on college degrees. As knowledge earned from college degrees becomes outdated, employees are looking for versatile “soft skills” such as leader ship or creativity. The education sector, however, has not made similar changes, and thus hasn’t been able to effectively prepare students for the workforce. “When you have an entire

K-16 that’s geared not to [skills] and suddenly you ask people to pivot…one way to do this equitably is really to redefine what we’re doing in [K-16] education,” said Sujata Bhatt, a senior fellow at Transcend Education and GTS 2020 speaker.

There are many ways schools can pivot their curriculum to wards a job market that is increasingly focused on skills. Eschewing assignments based on memorization will help stu dents prepare for a world where up to 50% of the facts that they memorize today will no longer be relevant tomorrow. Incorporating curriculum that expands beyond college prep can also prepare students for the modern workplace. In certain schools in Kuopio, Finland, a rich arts-based curriculum helps expose students not only to art institutions in their communi ty, but also lessons on healthy relationships and environmental sustainability. And in the LRNG program, an online education platform operating in the U.S., badge accreditation helps students master specific soft skills, such as conflict resolution, and verifies the achievement with a digital badge.

Further, project-based learning is something schools can im plement to match an emphasis on skills in the workplace without reworking their entire curriculum. By working on projects, students learn teamwork and time management—soft skills that will better prepare them for the projects they might tackle in the workplace. Additionally, projects can help students garner research skills and technical abilities, such as working with a specific type of software or coding.

As the education sector transforms over the course of this pandemic, it must pivot to accommodate the fast-paced changes of the modern workforce. Education can help students prepare for today’s workforce by foregoing memorization assignments, helping students acquire soft-skills, and teaching through pro ject-based learning. Perhaps this oft recommended focus on skills in the classroom will help ensure that today’s students are not replaced by tomorrow’s robots in the workforce.

About the author: Allyson Berri is an Education Corre spondent and Contributing Editor for Diplomatic Courier.

WILL COVID-19 REMOVE BARRIERS TO REMOTE WORK?

BY ALLYSON BERRI

Back in March, when many of us swapped boardrooms for Zoom rooms and suit sets for sweatsuits, journal ists started imagining a future where remote work be came as common as water cooler gossip. In April, up to half of American workers were working remotely, and 60% of these remote workers said they preferred working from home. In June, the computer software company Ciena found that a little more than two thirds of British adults ex pected to continue working from home after the crisis was over. And in early February, when local governments in China started encouraging remote work, millions of Chinese workers found themselves working from home for the first time.

There are many potential benefits to a future where the “new normal” includes working regularly in pajamas. Working from home can cut lengthy commutes completely, reducing emis sions. Remote work can also be beneficial to parents trying to balance work and family responsibilities. With so many considering the perks of a permanently out-of-office workforce, remote work was a central topic at this year’s Global Talent Summit, a virtual forum where leaders from a variety of sec tors met to discuss the future of work and education.

At the 2020 GTS, during a discussion on remote work, Diana El Azar, Senior Director in Strategic Communications at Minerva Schools asked, “Is the barrier to enter into the…privileged workplace lower?” Her question targeted a central issue within the remote work debate. Many wonder whether the widespread transition to remote work will make office jobs more available to a wider range of employees. However, the realities of remote work can help indicate whether this outcome is even remotely likely. Currently, only 37% of American jobs could be performed remotely; a European report estimated that the same percentage of jobs could be done at home across the EU.

Further, whether companies will make remote options availa ble to more prospective employees also depends on how much they are to invest in remote work. Companies might not be will ing to invest in the technology needed to help remote workers be successful. For example, firms might need to purchase spe cific software to help workers collaborate remotely, but might not see the purchase as benefitting their whole workforce.

Additionally, hiring and recruiting people remotely might prove incredibly difficult, given hiring and tax laws both internation ally and between different areas of the same country are dif ferent. Additionally, whether the pandemic will make remote options available in office jobs also depends on the availability of remote positions after the pandemic. The history of remote work makes its longevity in a post-pandemic world questionable at best. After all, companies have been trying to make remote work “work” for almost forty years. However, over the years corporate giants such as BestBuy and IBM have conducted experi ments with remote work that have ended in widespread returns to the office. In 2009, 40% of IBM’s 386,000 employees across 173 countries were working from home, but by 2017, thousands were called back into the office. A BestBuy remote work project that began in 2004 was halted in 2013 over concerns that it gave employees too much freedom.

Ultimately, as with many things during this pandemic, we are left to wait and see what the future of remote work will hold. However, despite its many benefits, the odds that remote work opportunities will make office work available to a wider vari ety of employees remains slim. Past failed experiments with remote work alongside prohibitive upfront costs for employ ers make it likely that office work will remain for those able to commute for their 9-to-5.

About the author: Allyson Berri is an Education Correspondent and Contributing Editor for Diplomatic Courier.

POST-PANDEMIC URBAN PLANNING

BY ALLYSON BERRI

It was the country’s first public park, spread across al most 800 acres of land fit squarely within the city’s grid system. At the time, it was thought that such a massive green space would be beneficial to both human and en vironmental health, and the park’s success led to a movement to democratize green spaces across the country. In deed, New York City’s Central Park was a turning point for green space in the United States. But perhaps most fascinat ing in the current moment is that America’s first park is the result of pandemic illness.

Historically, pandemics have prompted many of the changes associated with modern cities. After a 1793 yellow fever out break in Philadelphia killed over 10% of the city’s population, the mayor initiated emergency funding to clean the gutters. Philadelphia’s efforts were “a harbinger of urban planning re forms,” and over the next 50 years cities would implement san itation departments and garbage removal. During the 1850s, American cholera outbreaks prompted the development of city public health and urban planning agencies, the likes of which paved the way for the development of Central Park in New York City. By the 20th century, outbreaks of diseases like typhoid and influenza spurred tenement reform and led to the development of urban planning.

Seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many are asking how the virus might change urban spaces. At the 2020 Global Talent Summit (GTS), a virtual forum where thought leaders from a variety of sectors discussed how education and work are changing for a post-pandemic world, many noted that COVID-19 has offered opportunities to change urban centers for the better. Many voices in urban planning and beyond have offered ideas for how the pandemic might change city life. “Something tells me ‘second-tier cities’ will come out of this stronger than maybe the mega cities,” Sebastien Turbot, CEO of eko6 and GTS presenter offered. “…[Second tier cities] will come out having proven that they’re more resilient than their bigger sisters.”

Other voices in urban planning have identified specific fea tures of urban life, which are likely to change as a result of the pandemic. Architectural solutions like modular construction, a method which involves assembling factory-built components on site to quickly build structures, will come into play. Some think that this prolonged period of social starvation might lead cities to develop more community-oriented spaces, such as parks or promenades. Others think that large gathering cent ers, such as sporting arenas or shopping malls, will be rede signed to accommodate social distancing.

However, others wonder if cities will change at all after the pandemic. “I broadly don’t think there are going to be as many long-term changes coming out of this pandemic as we think there are right now,” Jody Kelman, Director of Product Management at Lyft and GTS speaker argued. And even if there is change in the aftermath of COVID-19, some wonder if urbanists are focusing on the right changes when they consider post-pandemic city planning. In an article for Curbed, jour nalist Alissa Walker argues that many plans for urban reform that have emerged during the pandemic reflect pre-pandemic urban agendas, which primarily benefit affluent white communities. Walker notes that open streets and more green space won’t magically result in urban equality. To address the systemic issues that have led to disproportionate COVID-19 deaths in Black and Latinx communities, urbanist proposals for better cities in a post-pandemic world must consider racial, economic, and environmental inequalities.

About the author: Allyson Berri is an Education Correspondent and Contributing Editor for Diplomatic Courier.

FLATLAND COMPETING FOR TALENT IN A GLOBAL VIRTUAL WORK ENVIRONMENT

With the job landscape trending towards a global virtual work environment, finding the right tal ent in this continuously shifting ecosystem has proven difficult for organizations and employ ers. Indeed, with the unprecedented arrival of a global pandemic suddenly seeing to a forced shift in new remote work models for industries across the board, the ability of current employers, employees, and jobseekers to adapt to this new digital environment will undoubtedly reveal whether or not we are prepared for a truly global virtual work environment.

How are we going to build a more resilient, digital-focused ed ucation-to-work pipeline after the pandemic? How will employ ers qualify and verify talent in a virtual world abundant with disorganized data and misinformation? And as connection to the office weakens, how will employers continue to develop talent, enhance work culture and upskill? These were the ques tions that speakers attempted to answer at the last Global Tal ent Summit.

The education-to-work pipeline has become “datafied.”

While access to a potential employee’s background, qualifica tions, badges, and skills has become easier than ever before for employers as the education-to-work pipeline continues to rely more heavily on data and technology, the sheer amount of aggregate data on potential hires in addition to employers’ general inability to accurately determine whether or not a po tential employee’s badges actually signal their readiness for the job have created a new set of issues in finding and hiring the right talent.

We’re working with aggregate information about individuals that is neither meaningful nor actionable. While an abundance of general-level information on an individual’s background— such as prior work experience, university degrees, and certi fications—may seem to check all of the necessary boxes for employers, in reality this aggregate information only tends to represent human heuristics and trends in hiring practices rather than a potential employee’s actual capacity to successfully fill his or her new job role.

In fact, a study conducted by the University of Florida regard ing the connection between prior work experience and attrition found that contrary to employers’ expectations that little time spent in previous job roles would also reflect time spent in their new role, there was nearly zero correlation between a new employee’s length of average time at prior jobs and the amount of time spent in the job they were eventually hired for—dem onstrating that many of the things employers have traditionally found to be clear signals of a good hire may actually be a case of bad intuition.

We need methods to sort through misinformation and unnecessary data. In addition to the ambiguity of aggregate informa tion, being able to verify this information—and sort through the fact and fiction of it all—can prove difficult. Relying on sources such as an individual’s LinkedIn profile, outdated transcripts, and unverified badges can lead to an inaccurate profile of a potential hire, and may even lead to dangerous non-inclusive and non-diverse hiring practices. Even when a potential hire’s information has been verified, it can be difficult to determine whether or not this information is an accurate reflection of a hire’s set of real-world skills.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, focusing on skill-based hiring can prove unsuccessful as employers continue to rely more heavily upon keywords and patterns in the data in a way that can make them blind to other assets—or disadvantages—a po tential employee may have to offer that hiring algorithms would not be able to pick up—such as soft skills.

We need to be paying closer attention to things outside of the data. Beyond degrees, certificates, and badges, the more unquantifiable soft skills necessary to succeed in nearly any job role—such as someone’s ability to be agile and resilient, for example—ultimately prove to be much better determinants as to whether someone will make a successful employee or not. Therefore, it is crucial that we focus on building a more robust

profile about individuals that includes not only someone’s formal written achievements, but also include who they are as a person and how they operate in a fluctuating environment full of novel opportunities and challenges.

It is hard to determine whether or not badges, certificates, and degrees are an accurate representation of a person’s skills.

With thousands upon thousands of badges, certificates, de grees, and accreditations tied to potential employees in today’s job market, determining the quality of the program that produced the certification—and whether or not an individual still possesses the competency supposedly earned through the accreditation of such a program—can provide particularly difficult for employers when looking for new talent.

More difficult than verifying a badge is being able to understand the information payload within the badge itself. When looking for new talent, it is crucial that employers understand not only what badges an individual possesses but also what those badges represent in terms of the skills that were attained. Similarly, they need to understand the providence of the badge, who issued the badge, and how the badge came to be.

It is difficult to determine whether a badge or certificate accurately certifies a set of obtained skills—and not just a credential reflecting a moment in time. For example, while nearly every employer relies on an individual’s university degrees and transcripts as a reflection of the knowledge and competen cies they acquired while in college, it is often true that these certificates do not accurately reflect an individual’s competencies as most college graduates do not necessarily retain a lot of what they learned in basic university classes. Therefore, in order to determine whether or not a certification reflects not only the acquisition or mastery of a particular competency or skill, but also that these skills stick long-term, it is important to look closely at someone’s certificates and see if the certified skill was verified among multiple dimensions and perspectives through original and unprompted applications.

One example of a certification program focused on teaching skills and competencies across multiple dimensions would be the New Tech Network, a group of two hundred plus budgetbased schools around the United States focused on transform ing traditional classrooms into environments of innovative learning. By encouraging students to engage in project-based learning—and then assessing not only the final product, but also

thoroughly reviewing the student’s oral and written communi cation, collaboration skills, sense of agency and other attributes through self-review, peer-review, advisor feedback and community mentor feedback—educators are able to get a fuller picture of how students obtain both soft and hard skills across multiple perspectives in multiple environments, and students are able to develop their skills and competencies in a more robust way.

The future of work in a post-COVID-19 world will be even more remote.

While the job market has undoubtedly been trending towards more remote work in the past decade, the mass disruption caused by COVID-19 has spurred organizations around the world to move almost exclusively towards the remote work model required by social isolation, with many of these organi zations having little to no experience working with this mod el. What does this shift of responsibility in work culture mean for talent development and the future of work? How will the job landscape’s shift towards remote work look differently in a post-pandemic world?

Personal and professional spheres collide in a world of remote work during the pandemic. With the social isolation measures put into place to curb the spread of COVID-19, many workers who have gone remote have had to face new challenges as per sonal and professional spheres have often become intertwined. With children at home and out of school to keep in line with social distancing measures, workers themselves isolated at home to also keep with these measures and the added stress, anxiety and fear that have come from the pandemic and the sudden change in lifestyle, this shift towards remote work has been no easy task for organizations or employees.

On a more positive note, however, the intermingling of individu als’ personal and professional lives has actually humanized some leaders and brought many organizations closer together into a tighter-knit community culture, as well as brought about new methods of remote work that could very well change how—and more importantly, where—we work moving forward.

The shift towards remote work will come with many challenges. As we shift towards remote work in a constantly changing landscape, the need for flexible and adaptable workers is becoming more important than ever. But what happens when someone fits a company’s skillset but isn’t able to adapt to the medium through which they’re meant to apply those skills—

such as an older person with weak computer skills suddenly being tasked with completing all requirements of their job from a desktop at home? And more importantly, how do you make the transition from skills that were cultivated to fit a more tradi tional system to a new environment where these skills may need to be adapted and applied in a context we can’t always predict?

There are teams that won’t be able to work remotely. While the job landscape’s sudden shift towards forced remote work has shown to some degree just how many jobs can be successfully accomplished from a remote workplace, the need for frontline employees—such as store associates, skilled labor jobs, sports teams, and many healthcare providers, to name a few—demon strates that as we move forward, it is crucial that organizations are able to accurately determine which roles can be fulfilled remotely, which roles must be accomplished in a physical space, and which kinds of roles can switch between remote and inperson tasks.

Talent diversity and inclusion will be more important than ever before in the future of jobs.

As the work-talent pipeline becomes more datafied, those from more diverse backgrounds and underserved communities are at risk of becoming subject to biased algorithms, misconstrued data patterns, and a general lack of access to informa tion. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that we ensure the most vulnerable segments of the population are equipped with the skills and competencies necessary to thrive in a postpandemic workforce.

Students do not have access to intelligence about where the future of work is going. While basic access to education was already a major problem before the advent of COVID-19, the pandemic has undoubtedly exacerbated this problem, with an estimated 40 percent of students around the world having had no access to any kind of education for at least three months into the pandemic. Even students who have managed to con tinue their education and earn valuable skills and competencies are often unaware of what they can do with those skills and what opportunities may be available to them. While technol ogy will no doubt play a huge part in providing information to students about new opportunities in work and education mov ing forward, the basic challenges of infrastructure, access, and regional disparities will continue to keep those in vulnerable and underserved communities from access to such opportuni ties until those challenges have been addressed.

Many organizations are already working towards talent diversity and inclusion. For example, Minerva Project at KGI, a lead ing educational innovator, has approached the problem of lack of diversity and inclusion in higher educational institutions by changing their approach to socioeconomic status blind admissions when admitting students through practices such as no preference to school status, getting rid of pre-written essays and changing other practices that often gave preference to those from wealthier socioeconomic backgrounds, thus becoming the most selective university in the world with a 0.8% acceptance rate—and a student population of nearly 80% of students that normally wouldn’t be able to afford university tuition.

These sorts of programs demonstrate that while not easy, it will be possible to diversify and create a more inclusive talent pool moving forward—to the benefit of both employers and poten tial employees.

MINDSETS OVER SKILLSETS

THE SHIFTING NATURE OF PROFESSIONAL READINESS

In a future full of hybrid workplaces, gig jobs and technol ogy such as robots and artificial intelligence, it will be our mindsets more than our skillsets that will determine our success in finding and navigating this evolving job landscape. Indeed, resilient soft skills, emotional intelligence and the willingness to be able to constantly change and adapt will be critical moving forward, as well as the ability to not only meet the challenges of today, but to ask new questions and create the challenges of tomorrow as well. Ultimately, it will take both an individual awareness of one’s strengths and skills as well as the ability to use and develop those skills in a variety of team and organizational environments that will enable one to succeed no matter what in the shifting nature of professional readiness.

Assessment at the individual and organizational levels is necessary to finding and developing resilient soft skills.

Beyond technical skills and competencies whose significance tends to fluctuate with the ever-changing landscape of jobs, it is the more resilient soft skills—communication, critical think ing, problem solving, teamwork, management, leadership and writing, to name a few—that will prove the success of how well an individual will be able to navigate the future of jobs.

Soft skills cannot be assessed the same way as technical skills. Unlike the more easily assessable technical skills, soft skills are demonstrated through the way an individual applies them in different situations and environments over a period of time. Therefore, in order to assess an individual’s soft skills— such as their ability to communicate, work on a team and solve a variety of novel problems—it is important that individuals are able to demonstrate these skills repeatedly across a variety of situations, and that, more importantly, employers continually work with their team members to develop and foster these skills and strengths.

Self-assessment is crucial. Just as it is important for organiza tions to accurately assess current and potential talent, it is just as important that individuals are able to complete self-assess ments in order to better understand their strengths and talents and figure out how to cultivate and articulate these strengths to potential employers. However, self-assessment is no easy task—especially with a large barrier of access to intelligence about what skills are actually needed in the job market today as well as a lack of access to resources such as career coaching and counseling for a majority of individuals from underserved communities. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that in formation about the job market as well as resources for career development be made more universally accessible to everyone, regardless of location.

It’s the balance between individual self-assessment and organizational assessment that will bring about professional development. Even after an individual is hired into an organiza tion, it is crucial that they continue to develop their soft skills and strengths not only on at the individual level, but also as a member of the organizational culture and environment they’ve been tasked to function in. Likewise, it is equally important that the organization fosters a sense of leadership and culture that allows individuals to safely fail, and to more importantly, fail fast and fail forward.

Trying to align the educational system with the job skills arena has proven extremely difficult. With so many companies still relying on traditional and outdated signals—such as screening by university degree and background—that may not necessarily tie to the skills that employers are searching for, many indi viduals still adhere to more outdated forms of education that are not preparing them for the real world of work. Likewise, with employers often creating job descriptions that are lengthy, ambiguous and a poor reflection of the actual skills and talent they are looking for, both individuals and educational institu tions are having a difficult time understanding the needs of the job market. Therefore, it is on both educational institutions and large organizations to communicate between each other more effectively and understand how to scale their job roles and job descriptions to find and foster the right kind of candidates.

Soft skills will be even more necessary in the hybrid workforce.

In the conventional workplace environment where traditional organizations tended to patiently nurture people over decades to become well-adapted members of the organizational eco

system, and where soft skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership were more easily applied and developed, these skills will be harder to naturally cultivate in the highly digital space required by a hybrid workforce—and therefore, all the more necessary.

Hybrid education is preparing students for the hybrid workforce. While the social isolation required by COVID19 has brought on a sudden shift from traditional physical classroom learning models to remote learning for over 1.7 billion students around the globe, it was found that students with a tendency towards soft skills such as critical thinking, creativity and selfregulation were best at adapting quickly and effectively to this disruption. Along the same lines, an analysis published by Mc Kinsey and Company asking HR practitioners what important soft skills were missing right now in the workforce found that those same skills—critical thinking, creativity, self-regulation, in addition to problem solving, communication, and the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity—were what was most necessary to the hybrid workforce moving forward. Therefore, as education continues to experiment with new models and environments of learning, there is hope that students will be able to take these developing soft skills and apply them to their future job roles.

Organizations need to change the way they view job candidates. At IBM, for example, an effort to shift attention more on skills and less on a candidate’s background has led the or ganization to strip out resumes full of what they deem to be unnecessary background information such as job history, age and gender, redo lengthy job descriptions that often discour age qualified candidates—especially women—from applying, and dismiss the college degree as a requirement for a large por tion of their workforce. In this way, IBM is attempting to dem onstrate that by focusing less on these traditional signals and more on a candidate’s technical, soft and transferrable skills, or ganizations such as IBM can more effectively find and develop new talent that can effectively adapt to the hybrid workforce.

These soft skills can be found in abundance in vulnerable and underserved communities. Soft skills such as resilience, adapt ability, critical thinking and problem solving are often the build ing blocks for people who have come from a place of strug gle—such as those who are first generation, people of color and those who come from a low-income background. When looking for new talent, therefore, it may be more effective to put less fo cus on an individual’s achievements and credentials and focus

more on where they have come from, the struggles that have built and developed them, the hurdles they’ve overcome and their potential to continue to meet and overcome challenges moving forward.

In a hybrid workplace, effective communication skills will become even more important. In a conventional physical work place environment where face-to-face interactions can provide quick and effective feedback to leaders about whether or not they are effectively leading their teams, the ability for organi zations to nurture the same level of communication and team building that comes more naturally in shared physical space—es pecially when working together over a long period of time—will become especially difficult in the sparse ecosystem of the hybrid workplace. It is crucial, therefore, that individuals fine-tune their communication skills in order to be more talented and adept at picking up on these sparse communication signals from every body else about how they should be fitting into the organization.

We may not be able to predict which jobs will exist, but we do know they will all require a human element.

While we may not be able to predict exactly which jobs will be created in the future, we do know that they will require a high degree of emotional and social intelligence—and a constant thirst for knowledge.

Emotional intelligence will be fundamental, not ornamental, in a future of jobs dominated by robots and artificial intelligence. With the near inevitable future takeover of robots and AI in jobs that are more repetitive or manual by nature—even including some jobs requiring basic cognitive skills—the job market will eventually require individuals to work in jobs where more human traits—such as social and emotional intelligence— will be necessary. These would include not only higher order cognitive skills, such as synthesis, analysis and creativity, but more importantly, key emotional skills such as empathy. Indeed, even if one day robots and AI may be able to work on a basic level in some of the more care- and support-based human job roles, it is most likely that humans will always want humans to fill those roles in working to teach, lead, care, support and empathize with each other.

The skill of learning, unlearning and relearning will be fundamental to navigating the future of jobs. More than ever, it will be crucial for individuals to not only develop skillsets, but to be able to learn how to apply, adapt and reinvent their skillsets to a

variety of environments as the future of jobs continues to trend towards hybrid workplaces and the gig economy. Therefore, it will not only be soft skills such as adaptability, critical thinking and problem solving that will aid individuals, but also a continu ous desire to learn and the ability to unlearn and relearn that will help people succeed in the unpredictable future job landscape.

It is time for disruption by design in the education sector. More than skills, it is important that we begin creating whole people who are prepared for whatever life may throw at them—and this will require new experimental models of education rather than a continuation of current institutions with very measurable distinct built-in barriers to change. Stackable short-term credentials that allow individuals the option to pursue a degree in a non-linear fashion, for example, could open the door to education for many people who do not have the time or resources to pursue a de gree in the traditional four-year route. Similarly, innovation labs and other more real-world based education models will be nec essary to foster the skills such as critical thinking and problem solving that will be essential to all job roles in the future.

We need to be having smart conversations now that set ourselves up for the future. Most important of all, we need to be creating and supporting communities and platforms that bring together the best and brightest in every industry to have continuous strategic, smart and intentional conversations about the future of work, the future of education and the future of humanity.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.

While the transition towards a more remote workforce has been in effect for some time now, the disrup tion brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused a large percentage of the workforce to sud denly enter into a remote working situation has shed a light on many of the major challenges of working remotely—as well as some of the potential benefits. While it is unknown as to whether or not remote work will remain the new norm moving forward, there is no doubt that models such as the hybrid and remote workplace will con tinue to expand. Indeed, recent data from a survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review revealed that 1 in 6 jobs that have become remote due to the social distancing measures put in place to ease the spread of COVID-19 are predicted to stay remote at least two days a week—even after the pandemic.

As we continue to move forward into this unpredictable new job land scape, several questions can be raised. What will be the continued effects of this all-remote workforce? What are the advantages and disadvantages to a physical office space versus a digital working envi ronment? And more importantly, how will the potential continued re percussions of this pandemic affect urban centers and the tie between physical location and work?

Interaction and communication are essential in both physical offices and remote work models. With the sudden transition into a remote work setting for many people, it has become much more apparent just how important interaction and communication are in running a com pany—and even more so, just how much the physical environment one works in can affect those factors.

The physical space between people matters. While the pandemic has brought about a deep level of empathy and a whole person approach that has made the sudden forced transition to remote work slightly more manageable, it has also brought to light just how important of a role collective space—be it a physical office, workshop, etc.—plays in social interaction, collaboration, creativity, and insight. Indeed, while virtual platforms can often serve as an effective space for dealing with basic meetings and more transaction-based issues, it is the more creative brainstorming and novel problem solving that will ultimately

THE ROLE OF URBAN CENTERS FOR AN ALL-REMOTE WORKFORCE

require the human approach of people sitting around a table and col laborating with one another face-to-face in a shared space.

Urban centers can serve as an environment of socialization for those in fully remote working positions. While organizations no doubt ben efit from providing employees with a collaborative workspace, those in fully remote positions are not always able to participate in such an environment, and therefore, it is important that companies are extra intentional about creating a company culture in the online space as well. Similarly, on a more personal level, in order for individuals to not feel trapped to the social isolation that is often brought on by being socially distanced from their teams and colleagues, it is important that individuals are also intentional about socializing through other facets as well, such as rediscovering their neighborhood or even working alongside friends in a co-working space.

As we transition back to a hybrid workforce model, certain things from the pandemic will stick and certain things will not. As organiza tions slowly transition back to their original work structures, it will be important to analyze how factors such as efficiency, synergy, communication and real-life versus digital interaction affect different peo ple in different working environments during the pandemic in order to better understand how to address the needs of the future hybrid workforce. Indeed, if we are to continue working towards a future of remote and hybrid work, it is important that we use the pandemic to collectively become more conscious of these factors—but until we have a fuller understanding of the real value of these interactions, we will most likely not have enough information to drive the smart deci sion-making necessary to generate a truly effective hybrid workforce.

We don’t know the long-lasting effects COVID-19 will have, if any, on city migration. While pandemics of the past have traditionally altered the ways in which cities are planned, zoned, and created, it will be diffi cult to determine the long-lasting effects that the COVID-19 pandemic will have not only on urban life itself, but also the way in which people migrate in and out of cities.

It’s a time of recalibration and rebalancing for urban centers. As people continue to move in and out of city centers, the role of cities in peoples’ lives is transforming—and it is therefore important to use this time of change to recalibrate urban centers in terms of creating environments where people can live and work without sacrificing the quality of life of the city itself. However, with many mega cities having gotten to the point where people come into the city to work but can no longer afford to live there, inequality, homelessness, and joblessness have become an even larger problem for cities across the world. As we move forward, it is of the utmost importance that cities con

tinue to work towards creating an environment that supports diversity without gentrification, density without congestion, and serendipity without over-crowdedness in order to allow people to move back in and experience a better quality of life—as well as set the groundwork for an improved and more creative knowledge-based economy.

While change is necessary, the pandemic alone will most likely not lead to many long-lasting effects on the urban landscape. While the pandemic has undoubtedly transformed many facets of life as we know it in the present, in the long-run, the fairly inflexible nature of human behavior will lead us back to business as usual. Data from Lyft, for example, has already demonstrated that as cities start to open back up, the number of people using car-sharing services has also dramatically increased. Therefore, rather than as suming that human behavior will change in some significant way due short-term changes to city life brought on by the pandemic, it is more likely that people will continue to move in and away from cities for the same reasons as before the pandemic—and conse quently, it will be more important for city planners to continue their work in reshaping cities around people to attract talent back to the cities and create a better quality of life for its inhabitants.

Technology can bring access and inclusion to those who don’t live in cities. With the continued transition of the job landscape towards hybrid and remote work, living within or nearby urban centers may no longer become a necessity, and skilled individuals from more dis advantaged backgrounds may gain wider access to jobs that only require a computer. However, with less than 50% of the world still with out access to the internet and other basic necessary technologies, it is of the utmost importance that focus continue to be put on creating the infrastructure necessary to bringing technology to every part of the world so that access to jobs will be made available to everyone, regardless of physical location.

It will be essential to adapt to the changes created by the COVID-19 pandemic for cities to become more resilient moving forward.

In order to build more resilient cities for the future, it will be cru cial to look at how different cities have responded in different ways to the major disruptions caused by the pandemic. As we move forward, it will be vital to collect evidence and research on the effects the pandemic has had on cities in order to engage in smart decision-making about how cities can become more resil ient. As we slowly transition back to the new normal, gathering information about which cities displayed better resilience during the pandemic will be crucial. Conducting research into the causes of migration out of cities before and after the pandemic, survey

ing neighborhoods to create street-level ethnographical models that can be studied, and looking into how urban cities can become magnets for talent, or example, are some of the ways that will help inform decision-making moving forward and allow cities and its inhabitants to come out of the crisis much more resilient and vibrant than before.

It is time to explore more innovative development models. With the current model of cities being largely centered around who has access to land and capital for development, this financial incentive structure has created an unsustainable model of inequity. Consequently, a shift away from opportunity zones controlled by the top one to two percent of people who hold power in cities to more equitable models—such as community-based and shared equity models—will be necessary in order to make cities more resilient following the wake of the pandemic.

Second-tier cities can provide an example of resilience. As we transi tion out of the pandemic, it is more likely we will see, more than the mega cities, that it is the second-tier cities with a higher perception of quality life that are coming out of the pandemic more resilient than before. Indeed, it is the ways in which these smaller cities have suc cessfully responded to the pandemic that we can ultimately use as an example of how to foster creativity, innovation and learning in order to attract and retain talent in the cities of the future.

SCALING THE PARENTAL WALL

While the “working parent” has traditionally had to silently struggle in balancing work responsi bilities and career advancement with raising and caring for children, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention and a new sense of empathy for the plight of those who work and parent at the same time. Indeed, as the traditional family model con tinues to shift away from the model of one working parent and one child-rearing parent to a newer model where both parents as well as single parents are required to work, policy at both the company and federal level will be necessary to address the needs of working parents, as well as a mindset and cultural shift towards destigmatizing many of the taboos surrounding work ing parents. However, as each individual employee experiences unique parental challenges, the ability for employers to address and support their working parents can prove difficult—especially during a pandemic. The question remains then: how can the role of employers evolve in order to better deal with the unique needs of working parents? And more importantly, what can be done on the governmental level to address the universal needs of parents in every industry?

Parental needs and employment needs are changing.

With both parental responsibilities and work responsibilities increas ing for working parents, the support of their organizations, commu nities and the government will be necessary.

While the fundamental parental need to support children has not changed, the world we are raising our children in has. Though chil dren require a certain set of needs that are universal—the need to be well sheltered, well fed and most of all well-loved—the evolving landscape of education and jobs has changed the kind of education

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF EMPLOYERS IN DEALING WITH THE NEEDS OF WORKING PARENTS

children are expected to learn, as well as the necessity to be able to more flexibly respond to the way our world is rapidly evolving.

As such, parents are expected to take care of their children in a way that will prepare them for this unknown future—all while tackling it themselves. Indeed, with the increasing expectation for parents to do more for their children while also being expected to do more for their companies and employers, parents are facing increasing pres sure in both their home and work lives—and with the pandemic sud denly seeing these two worlds collide, the need for parents to be supported by their companies, their communities and their govern ments is more critical than ever.

The pandemic is affecting different parents in different ways. Just as parents working remotely will have different needs than parents working on the frontline, the needs of parents with chil dren of different ages—from parents of newborns, to parents with children in K-12, to parents with grown children and even parents taking care of their own parents—has affected working parents of all different backgrounds in very unique ways, and therefore, it is crucial that solutions be more individualized in or der to empower parents who work as best as possible based on their unique circumstances and challenges.

There is a wide range of solutions, but it is not easy to understand how to adapt them individually to each parent’s unique needs. When it comes to recognizing the supports working parents need at this time, much of the responsibility is falling on the manager—on how they’re engaging with and supporting their employees in terms of work flexibility, time off and other benefits. However, with such a wide spectrum of employees with different needs—from parents with children in school to parents opting for homeschooling to single people with no children at all—understanding the needs of each indi vidual employee can prove a daunting task for employers.

Indeed, with so many different supports needed for so many differ ent circumstances of working parents, from needs such as a support community—which, for many parents, used to be their offices and communal work environments—to the differing levels of need for comfort and safety regarding how much outside contact their children can be exposed to, the ability for employers to accommo date personal circumstances and craft personalized strategies and solutions will be critical both during and after the pandemic—but it will be no easy task.

There needs to be a cultural shift from employers simply tolerating parental roles to truly appreciating working parents. As the pan demic has brought to light just how big of a struggle parents have in balancing work responsibilities with the responsibility of raising children, there is hope that the plight of working parents becomes less taboo and a true appreciation and empathy can be gained for parents in the workplace. More importantly, this appreciation and support must come not only from direct supervisors, but from com pany leaders and the government, with more focus being put on equitable policies—most especially family leave policies and universal childcare initiatives—to cover the universal needs of parents and children moving forward.

It is the right time for fathers to be fully and transparently embracing their role. As fathers spend more and more necessary time with their children, the stigma around men taking advantage of parental leave policies that exist within their companies—if they exist—needs to be lifted, and men should be encouraged to assist their spouses, to co-parent and to take on the role as lead parent when necessary, with the support of their company and employers.

Employers need to adopt new practices to change the working environment for parents.

The emotional culture of the workplace needs to be changed. As perspectives on parenting have shifted and a new type of intimacy has appeared, the stigma of not only recognizing and accepting employees as parents, but also the taboo of having children in the workplace, needs to be lifted. Indeed, perhaps until more universal childcare policies can be put into place, a shift towards reinventing workspaces and corporate campuses to allow for and accommodate children when necessary should be encouraged in order for individu als to more easily tackle both work and parental responsibilities.

Paid parental leave and universal childcare need to be federal policy. While support from employers will be necessary on the in dividual level, the current system of having benefits such as paid parental leave and childcare benefits tied to company policies and not protected on the federal level has caused many employees to lose portability, as their careers and trajectories are often dictated as to whether or not they can receive much needed childcare ben efits. Therefore, government public policy needs to be implemented through corporate intervention, company lobbying and companies across the board shifting towards a culture that engages and sup ports working parents.

We need to start by measuring parenting. In order to create better company and federal policy surrounding parenting, measuring how working parents move through organizations and whether or not employers are keeping them in the leadership pipelines and provid ing them with adequate support needs to become part of company leadership targets—and until we begin measuring such metrics, we will continue to have little to no line of sight into how to better sup port working parents.

The future for working parents is optimistic.

Despite the immense challenges working parents face balancing both work and childcare responsibilities in a time of crisis, the progress that has been made thus far and the surprising transparency and empathy COVID-19 has brought to the realities of parenting is cause for optimism that we will see exponential growth in policies and practices that better care for and support working parents in the next decade. Indeed, with many societies around the world already creating and maintaining healthy social constructs and ide as about parenting that serve as a support for company practices that care for the needs of working parents, we may already be entering into a new era where all companies have support systems in place for employees who work and parent simultaneously—and we may just be able to use this moment in history as a catalyst to continue to go better forward.

LEAPFROG WITH LEARNCARD

BY SCOTT MEYER

Walk to any park or playground and you might see kids playing leapfrog. Leapfrog is the game where one child crouches down and a second child vaults over them, using their back as a platform to propel them selves farther forward than they could jump on their own. The second child then crouches down for a third, who crouches for a fourth, and so on, creating a fast-moving path through the play ground where the level of entertainment and success is based on co operation and inclusivity. The more that play, the higher and farther each child can jump, and the longer the game line becomes.

Leapfrog isn’t confined to the playground. In the world of educa tion, best practices and tools can be built and shared, creating a “platform” from which learners and educators can “vault” them selves forward to more rapidly improve and accelerate the reach and quality of learning.

In the realm of technology, leapfrogging provides a shortcut in the traditional and sequential stages of development. The Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution calls developmental propulsion “non-linear progress.” You can think of it as going straight to mobile phones without the initial need to lay telephone lines; or instead of buying an entertainment system and wiring it through your home to speakers, you get a wireless Sonos system.

LEAPFROGGING IS A PHENOMENON WE’VE SEEN WITH VARIOUS TECHNOLOGIES:

• M-Pesa launched in Kenya to enable citizens to transfer money over their mobile phones. In a country where most of the population didn’t have access to a bank, M-Pesa leapfrogged the work of building a physical financial system throughout the country. As of 2019, over 80% of the pop ulation now uses mobile money compared to only 20% of Americans. Researchers have determined that M-Pesa lifted 2% of Kenyans out of poverty—almost 200,000 households. M-Pesa helped Kenyans leapfrog into the future of banking.

• Estonia built E-Estonia—an effort to connect citizens with the government using technology—when the country was re-established in 1991. There were no existing legacy institutions or systems, so the country could re-imagine what public institutions look like in a digital age from step one, including electronic residency for people outside the country. E-Estonia helped its citizens leapfrog into the fu ture of governance.

In both of these examples, a clear trend is set: True leapfrogging oc curs when digital technology is used to incite exponential growth in physical systems and infrastructures—the digital world of bits creat ing change in the physical world of atoms.

Education has the opportunity to start its own game of leapfrog. LearnCard is one tool working to kickstart this effort.

The Opportunity of Leapfrog

One of the most exciting prospects about leapfrogging into a future of education is the direct effect it will have on the future of work.

It is now possible for individuals to validate their experiences, knowledge and skills into a Learning and Employment Record - or LER.

Individuals own this LER, meaning they can use it to find and apply for jobs online and offline. Employers can be more confident hiring because they can see validated evidence that an individual can do the job, regardless of where they live or their official schooling. As individuals work, they continually build their personal portfolio, un locking more opportunity.

The future of work is a world where talent can better find opportunity and education can more quickly develop talent. For places with

underdeveloped infrastructures or outdated and inefficient legacy systems, the future of education is a leapfrog opportunity.

As a 2017 World Bank study on development in Africa succinctly put it: “Vertiginous changes brought about by the digital revolu tion in the past 20 years make leapfrogging . . . not only a possibil ity but a necessity.”

However, although the proliferation of tech development has pro duced a generation of digital-natives who have been exposed to the world of tech since childhood, they are not the majority. Most people are still digital-immigrants, meaning they were not saturated in the digital world at an early age, and so they have to learn, adapt, and become aware of their digital presence. For this very reason, Educa tional Technology (EdTech) that bridges the world of atoms and the world of bits can quickly improve the quality of life globally.

The ABC’s of Leapfrog

To inspire educational leapfrog globally, projects that focus on using technology to solve critical real world problems should focus on the ABC’s: atoms, bits, composability.

ATOMS

The very nature of EdTech means it’s primarily grounded in the world of bits. And yet much of its potential to leapfrog education is founded on its ability to connect to the physical world of atoms. This means that focus needs to be placed on helping people who live the majority of their lives offline. At the same time, working in the physical world may not be the forte of EdTech organizations, which is why partnerships will be key.

Working with partners in arenas spanning from finance and educa tion to transportation and governance, will allow the distribution of new EdTech solutions to reach more people and bridge the digital di vide separating those who are online and those who are not. Experts already working in these fields include non-profit organizations, educational institutions, financial companies, job placement agen cies, and more. Combining the skills and strengths of these entities could ensure equal opportunity to access digital benefits regardless of their technical skills or location.

BITS

The current problems of accessibility and operability in education and employment can be solved by EdTech using decentralized tech

nology, often referred to as web3 or blockchain technology. This technology can underpin the creation, ownership, and movement of learning and employment records, placing agency in the hands of the learner, and restructuring the future of work.

For example, when someone attends an in-person course or class, that experience can be documented and stored digitally. This pro cess allows experience from the physical word to be used in a system that uses bits. In addition, digital credentialing means learners can focus on more specific and applicable training, further preparing them for a future of work that will be centered around digital plat forms and opportunities.

But, bringing the benefits of digital progress to the aid of real world problems means a new set of demands for how people interact with, and move through, education and employment. As a result, educa tion projects that can anticipate the challenges of bringing digital advancements to the physical world will not only be affecting short term change, but preparing individuals for the future of work.

COMPOSABILITY

Making an impact means creating composable technology and sharing results so others can build.

In the game of leapfrog, this is called “giving a back.” After a turn leaping, each child crouches down so the next can vault forward.

Projects that are composable—meaning they can be re-used, re mixed, and replicated—will help other projects bridge the world of bits and atoms. In the world of EdTech, this means creating technology and projects that can be reused, remixed, and rep licated. An openness to building and sharing will help others bridge the world of bits and atoms, extending the developmental leapfrog further and faster.

By blazing the trail and sharing blueprints, EdTech will create the foundations needed for future work. The easier it becomes for digital technology to create change in the physical world, the more talent will work on these problems.

Few EdTech organizations or projects through working to solve problems in the world of atoms and bits. Learning Economy is attempting to do just that with LearnCard.

The ABC’s of LearnCard

LearnCard is a project from Learning Economy built in line with W3C international standards.

Conceptually, LearnCard is a safe place to keep and share impor tant things, both online and offline. Think of it as that safety de posit box or password protected folder where you keep everything

from educational transcripts to important identification papers to money you may need to use later. Unlike a safety deposit box or folder, however, the LearnCard can safely share that information with either a physical or virtual swipe, much like a debit card.

There are many ways this super safety deposit box could be used:

• If you need to make an online transaction or a purchase at a local grocery store, LearnCard can help.

• If you want to earn a badge for an online course or apply to the local university, LearnCard can help.

• If you are a refugee needing to prove your identity or a teenager excited to get your first driver’s license, Learn Card can help.

ATOMS AND BITS

Practically, LearnCard is a digital wallet (a W3C-compliant univer sal wallet for iOS, Android, and Web to be exact) and a physical debit card.

The digital wallet can hold digital money, known as cryptocur rency, in the form of a stablecoin to offer security and utility. It can also hold digital learning and employment records, known as verifiable credentials. Cryptocurrency from the digital wallet can be spent using the debit card, while records can be shared with schools or employers. A traditional wallet holds money, identifica tion, photos, and more. Your digital wallet will do the same thing. In this way, both crypto and personal records become usable in the real world. Anywhere that has credit card capabilities can ac cept cryptocurrency. Anyone that needs to validate information online or in an office can quickly and safely access the records.

The simple but revolutionary result is that digital items become immediately useful in a physical community. This is the essential bridge to unlock true leapfrog potential in education for people around the globe.

Digital natives can use LearnCard as a digital wallet, much like they would with MetaMask or Coinbase. They can also use their digital assets in the real world, better connecting the virtual and physical. As an example, their cryptocurrency can now be easily spent at the grocery store. Their online NFTs or certificates could unlock opportunities, such as tickets to an art show or qualifying them to interview for a job teaching at the local university.

Those in the world of atoms can use their physical LearnCard to enjoy the same capabilities and opportunities as digital natives. The physical debit card creates virtual opportunities and creates their digital accounts. This integration closes the opportunity gap between those who are frequently online and those who spend their lives in the physical world. In fact, the people who previous ly had poor digital access and fewer educational, financial, and/ or technological opportunities stand to benefit most from the chance to leapfrog ahead. Unlocking the world of bits provides significant benefits.

LearnCard users would unlock physical and digital capabilities with one tool:

• Individuals can learn new skills and have proof of those skills securely stored with LearnCard. LearnCard could show who issued the credential, the work the individual did to earn the credential, and work the individual could do with those skills. LearnCard provides professional opportu nities remotely and in-person.

• They can then earn money that would also be stored in their LearnCard, enabling access to the financial system even if they don’t have a credit history or access to a physi cal bank. Any location that accepts credit cards would also accept LearnCard.

• They can live and work in a physical community but enjoy the benefits of virtual technologies when, and if, they need them. A LearnCard provides digital accounts without the need to login to create those accounts.

LearnCard users will be well positioned for the future internet and the future of work. They will own and control their data no matter where they live, work, or move. For people in areas with an unstable government, volatile financial system, or limited professional opportunities, LearnCard provides the benefits of individual control, financial security, and professional mobility.

Composability

The composability of LearnCard lays a cornerstone for future pro jects that support the world of atoms and bits. LearnCard is built as an open source wallet that will run on iOS, Android, and open source tools. As such, it can be integrated into websites and apps. As Learning Economy notes in their concept paper:

LearnCard can be integrated into any existing applications, pro viding a web3 digital wallet layer for existing web2 systems, in cluding elearning platforms (e.g. EdX, Coursera, Udacity), HR and hiring applications, and learning management systems. It will also be modular and extensible by design, allowing it to connect to any layer one or layer two blockchain, cloud, or traditional serv er-based system. The LearnCard will become a standards-based global public utility for any and all edtech, HRtech, governments, institutions and learners worldwide that wish to utilize the power of digital verified credentials.

John Goodwin, Chairman of the Learning Economy Board and for mer CEO of the LEGO Foundation explains:

“Learning Economy is focused on global public goods infrastructure that will enable any number of applications to be developed while retaining the power of the individual owning their personal data.”

Existing companies in the world of atoms and emerging organi zations in the land of bits can build on top of LearnCard to more quickly bridge the two worlds. The trail blazed by LearnCard could inspire other projects to pursue a similar ABC strategy.

Projects that utilize web3 are ideal participants in this global, world-building game of leapfrog because of their continual mo mentum of progress. New economic models and models for work are emerging, built with blockchain technology. Using this tech nology in partnership with real-world partnerships could combine the idealism of web3 with the logistics experience of existing or ganizations.

Leapfrog is a game that is never static, and the same can be said for the mission of creating a standard for education and employment that is not hung up on old infrastructures, but instead focus es on the learner, and in doing so, makes accessibility the central component of the future of education and employment.

Goodwin notes that most EdTech interventions digitize existing practice from the world of atoms, often conforming to flawed practices that drive inequities. By starting with the infinite possi bility from the world of bits, EdTech projects that utilize decentralized technology can help organizations in the physical world refo cus with a design-thinking approach. They can identify a problem first, talk to those in need, and then use the scalable power of the blockchain to find relevant solutions that work for digital and physical natives.

The population most in need of these solutions and best positioned to leapfrog into higher qualities of life are refugee communities.

Refugees Leapfrogging with LearnCard

The initial pilot for LearnCard will seek to focus on refugee com munities. With 80 million refugees today, including millions fleeing Ukraine, and another 200 million refugees expected globally in the next decade from climate displacement, LearnCard can pro vide critical aid and access.

Refugees often have:

1. Limited access to the financial system.

2. A need to share financial opportunities from their new homes with their families who may still be in a refugee camp or in an impoverished area.

3. No records or way to demonstrate their skills to potential employers.

LearnCard solves these problems by:

1. Enabling transparent, direct support from the interna tional community to individual refugees most in need— transforming charity with DeFi.

2. Providing digital wallets and physical debit cards so ref ugees can safely store, transfer, and access their funds when needed.

3. Creating earn-to-learn opportunities that result in verifiable credentials so refugees can learn employable skills, get paid along the way, and share their expertise with employers.

4. Chairman Goodwin argues that any attempt to help refugees should begin by talking to refugees to understand their challenges and whether technology can help provide a solution. Although this design-thinking approach sounds obvious, it does not always happen.

LearnCard is leveraging the partnership strategy to maximize input from refugees and experts from the world of atoms. This feedback is helping build the bridge between the physical and digital worlds:

• MyGrants helps over 300,000 immigrants worldwide to earn money while learning high-demand skills. Employ ers are then matched with these potential employees. According to founder Christian Richmond Nzi, 86% of these refugees are still working in their positions six months af ter their placement. With this partnership, LearnCard can rapidly deploy education to refugees in need and connect them with professional opportunities.

• Credit card providers and fintech startups will help trans late digital wallets into physical debit cards. With an ex isting financial infrastructure accepted at locations world wide, these partnerships will provide leapfrogging access to refugees who are unbanked and less familiar with digital technologies.

The Composable Blueprint

LearnCard has enormous potential to create change.

However, its greatest impact may be providing a blueprint and inspiration for other builders to enter the world of atoms.

LearnCard is gathering myriad technologies and tools and repack aging them into a single point of entry for others to use. In short, LearnCard is the first jump in the game of leapfrog for future pro jects working to use the innovation of EdTech to solve some of the globes most pressing systematic and structural challenges.

LearnCard is built with a composable tech stack that includes:

• Verifiable Credentials (VCs)

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)

• W3C Universal Wallet Draft Specification

• A Trust Triangle that operates modularly with plugins for a variety of ecosystems, including traditional information systems, IPFS, and any layer 1 or layer 2 blockchain.

It also includes a skills library system built on a variety of opensource, composable tools that includes:

• Open Skills Management Tool (OSMT)

• Rich Skill Descriptors (RSD’s)

• Open Competency Framework

• Open Badges 3.0

LearnCard is the outcome of decades of work by multiple organizations. Building educational infrastructure across atoms and bits may be slow, but it continually accelerates when it is composable.

Join the Game of Leapfrog

Leapfrog is more fun when everyone is playing. The world of education is the same.

New educational technologies can improve the quality of life glob ally. Using the above ABC formula will help projects create new leapfrog opportunities for individuals, particularly refugees, that will prepare them for the future of work.

This transformational change in both the world of atoms and bits will only happen with collaboration.

More talent is needed. More projects are needed. More building is needed.

LearnCard is an important step in building the future of verified learning, financial mobility, and professional opportunity. The important question is who’s next?