Jason Bloomberg
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 andIBM IBM +0.16% CEO Ginni Rometty. The move is largely symbolic, however, as women represent only 20% of attendees at the confab.
World Economic Forum
WEF IT Governors press conference, featuring Alem Tedeneke, Media Manager at World Economic Forum (moderator); Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco; Cheryl Martin, Managing Director, Head of Industries, World Economic Forum; Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies; and Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.
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.
The WEF IT Governors community is responsible for SkillSET, recently under the chairmanship of Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco. The founding partners are Accenture ACN +0.33%, CA Technologies CA +0.75%, Cisco Systems CSCO +0.01%, Cognizant , Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE -0.63% (HPE), Infosys , Pegasystems PEGA +0%, PwC, Salesforce.com CRM +0.1%, SAP and Tata Consultancy Services .
Taking over for Robbins this year is Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies. “The kinds of jobs we create require a different skillset,” Gregoire said in an interview. “The IT Governors’ Council recognizes a need to play a more pivotal role in reskilling employees.”
While SkillSET will likely be useful for people who are out of work or looking to change careers, its primary purpose is to help employed people upgrade their skills within their current company.
Moving Up the Digital Food Chain
The reason such reskilling is so urgent is because so many of today’s corporate jobs are becoming obsolete. “Six million jobs in office administration across the globe are going away,” Gregoire continued. “This effort focuses on employees in the work world for five years or more, with jobs in danger of being displaced by technology.”
While such displacement is changing the white-collar employment landscape, it impacts blue-collar roles as well. “The line is blurring between blue-collar and white-collar work,” Gregoire said. “You’re still going to have to use a computer and work with data.”
Some of the content on SkillSET focuses on skills specific to the products of the participating companies, as there is broad market demand for such product-specific abilities. However, there is more to the initiative than supporting the products from the founding partners.
Many of the skills, in fact, are general technical skills as well as business-oriented, or ‘soft’ skills. “For example, project management, customer management, and overall business skills,” Gregoire explains. “These are the new basics.”
The expectation for the IT Skills Initiative is to level the playing field – not just among professionals in need of retraining, but also among women, blue-collar workers, and minorities, extending what the initiative calls ‘digital literacy’ to a broader corporate population. The goal? “help them move up the digital food chain,” Gregoire said.
In today’s turbulent business environment, making the most out of the digital food chain is a must for any individual looking to build their career and excel in the face of disruption. The IT Skills Initiative is one way the WEF is turning words into action in order to spread the necessary digital literacy to a global audience.
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.
Jason Bloomberg is president of industry analyst firm Intellyx. Follow Jason Bloomberg on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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