Adjustments needed to tackle job-skills mismatch globally: President Tharman at Davos panel

SINGAPORE – A mismatch between the skills that employers need now and in the future, and those that job seekers learn in school, poses more than an economic problem.

Left to fester, this mismatch could also dim confidence in education and social support systems in the long run when people feel that their efforts and expense have been for nothing, said President Tharman Shanmugaratnam on Jan 22.

It occurs when people cannot find jobs despite completing tertiary education, and is something both advanced and developing countries experience, he said in wide-ranging opening remarks for a panel discussion on closing the jobs gap, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which ends on Jan 24.

Moderated by Ms Jamie Heller, editor-in-chief of news outlet Business Insider, the panellists included Ms Veronica Nilsson, general secretary of the trade union advisory committee to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as Mr Denis Machuel, chief executive of human resources services firm Adecco Group.

Mr Ryan Roslansky, chief executive of professional networking platform LinkedIn, and Mr Gilbert Houngbo, director-general of the International Labour Organisation, were also involved in the panel discussion, which was attended by policymakers, activists and business leaders.

“We get a problem of a whole generation feeling the system has failed them,” President Tharman said, underscoring the scale of the challenge.

The adjustments needed to address this will include correcting what he said was an overly academic tilt taken by most countries, except Singapore and a few Nordic states, when they expanded tertiary education.

In most countries, he said, “we didn’t just expand enrolment beyond the age of 16 in education, we also had it tilted very heavily to one particular model of education that previously applied to a very narrow cohort of students when university education was rare”.

Such a narrow focus creates a hierarchy in which academic skills are ranked above technical skills or skills acquired on the job, giving rise to the mismatch, he added.

Ways must be found to make the technical and applied route for learning a means as well to achieving the highest levels of excellence and expertise, he said.

Another adjustment countries and hirers can make, he said, lies in recognising that soft skills, such as building a team of people with complementary strengths, can also be developed through vocational pathways, and are not the sole province of a traditional university education.

President Tharman also highlighted the potential for socio-political consequences that could shape a new international disorder arising from insufficient job creation in the developing and emerging world.

An unprecedented 1.2 billion people from those economies are set to enter the workforce in the next 10 years, yet “all reasonable projections” point to around 400 million jobs being created, he noted.

“The fact is: What you do to develop human potential through life shapes how well people do in jobs, whether they retain jobs, whether they’re able to adjust to the churn in the job market, whether they end up feeling they’ve had a satisfactory career,” he added.

Efforts to develop human potential need to start early and reach the majority of society, which entails a public school system that provides high-quality education to a broad base.

President Tharman noted that results for the Programme for International Student Assessment, an international benchmarking study to measure how well students use their knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems, have shown how valuable these systems are in meeting skills needs.

“The countries at the top are the countries where they’ve got public school systems, either universally, or in the main, and with public schools at the top as well. Excellence is not driven by private schools.”

He also called on both employers and governments to invest in training for workers right now and not wait till workers are displaced by new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI).

They should also reduce the gap in skills training, workplace injury compensation and social security contributions between the informal sector, which includes gig workers, and formal employment.

Afterwards, the panellists spoke on how informal employment can make up for the shortfall in job creation that President Tharman highlighted, as well as the social protection of gig workers, access to reskilling, skills-based hiring and regulatory frameworks for AI.

Ms Nilsson sounded concern for the direction that the discourse in Davos has taken on regulatory frameworks for AI’s impact on workers and workplaces.

She said collective bargaining cannot deal with all the issues that workers face with the rise of AI.

However, she said: “What I hear from all the discussions here at Davos is such a focus on deregulation, or call it better regulation, or smart regulation.”

She said such talk reminded her of past moves by leaders of the European Commission to make labour markets more flexible, which came at the expense of workers for the sake of an ideological agenda.