Two massive macroeconomic trends are colliding at this snowbound congregation of the world’s economic leaders: the insistence on providing a fair work environment for women and minorities, as well as the adverse impacts automation and artificial intelligence (AI) have on the global workforce.
Setting the tone: last November’s The Global Gender Gap Report 2017 from the World Economic Forum (WEF), which sounded the alarm over results that progress toward parity between men and women in technical roles had dropped since the report from the previous year. “In 2017, we should not be seeing progress towards gender parity shift into reverse,” according to Saadia Zahidi, WEF Head of Education, Gender and Work.
WEF redoubled its efforts to address this disparity at its own event, appointing women to all seven of the summit’s co-chair positions, including International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. The move is largely symbolic, however, as women represent only 20% of attendees at the confab.
The Reskilling Revolution
To combat the trend of increasing disparity, WEF has been focusing on reskilling workers as the key to workforce gender equality. In this month’s report Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All by WEF and The Boston Consulting Group, WEF discusses a data-driven approach to identifying reskilling and job transition opportunities.
WEF participants are not satisfied simply with writing reports, however. Today, the organization announced a new tech-reskilling drive targeting one million workers over the next three years. Dubbed the IT Skills Initiative, the effort centers on a web training portal. This portal, SkillSET, launched today. PwC, one of the founding companies of the effort, drove the creation of the portal.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/01/23/reskilling-top-of-mind-at-world-economic-forum-in-davos/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, and IBM are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: World Economic Forum.
