Global Opportunity Initiative Launch Event Creates a Movement to Tackle Workforce Development Challenges
August 5, 2022
While fears about robots taking over our jobs have abated in recent years, millions of workers around the world continue to struggle to advance their careers or to find decent work. A 2018 report from MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future found that technology exacerbated income inequality between high-skilled workers and those in middle-tier or low-paying jobs. The economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic has only widened this gap, disproportionately affecting workers from minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds. And globally, emerging economies have struggled the most to rebound.
“The time to address these challenges is now, but the time is always,” says George Westerman, Founder and Principal Research Scientist of the Global Opportunity Initiative (GOI), a movement to transform workforce learning worldwide. The GOI’s mission is to give the right skills to the right people in the right way, at global scale.
The Global Opportunity Initiative brings together organizations—of any kind—working to provide workers with the skills, guidance, and opportunities to succeed in today’s economy. GOI’s launch event took place virtually on June 17, 2022 and welcomed nearly 300 registered attendees. The daylong convening featured panelists from non-profit organizations, non-governmental agencies, and the private sector, each sharing insights into how to tackle the most pressing workforce challenges.
“We need to really prepare people for ever-accelerating change,” says Peter Hirst, Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education at MIT Sloan, who spoke on the launch event panel “Non-Profit Changemakers.” Noting “a swing back to individuals investing in their own career development,” Hirst echoed other panelists who observed a gap in workers’ access to and awareness of the tools and resources available for making such a change.
“The gap between what we know and what is being done is huge,” Tana Wuliji, another panelist, says. Wuliji is a team lead at the WHO Academy, the World Health Organization’s innovative lifelong learning center which aims to serve 10 million people globally. She explains that about a quarter of health workers don’t have reliable access to the Internet, which presents a significant obstacle to digital methods of workforce learning and development.
A major challenge that the GOI aims to address, then, is how to bring learning tools and resources to individuals in ways that work for them. “The people most affected by change need to be involved,” says panelist Charles Bodwell, Enterprise Development Specialist for East Asia and the Pacific at the International Labour Organization (ILO). Bodwell’s team builds sustainable approaches to job creation by training managers and employers using low-cost highly scalable approaches.
Other panels, including one on “Corporate Approaches to Career Development,” explored new pathways to career development that include not only training, but mentorship and personalized navigation resources. “We can’t hire our way out of the current challenges. We need to build skills with speed and do it in a way that aligns with employee preferences,” says Julie Dervin, Head of Global Learning and Development at Cargill, the largest privately-held corporation in the United States. A key takeaway from the panel was that investing in employee growth benefits both the company and its employees.
“We’re moving away from higher ed being the one path,” says Bledi Taska, who presented on “Research Insights for Career Development.” Bledi is the Chief Economist at labor market data company Emsi Burning Glass, now known as Lightcast. In the same panel, William Bonvillian, Lecturer at MIT and Senior Director of Special Projects at MIT Open Learning, advocated for more “work and learn” opportunities like apprenticeships and vocational education programs. “Community colleges will play a more important role,” Bonvillian says, “but we need to reach high schoolers and incumbent workers, not just community college students.”
Education and career navigation are just a few of the wicked challenges—complex and difficult-to-solve problems—in workforce learning. Others include disparities between what’s taught in schools and what’s expected in the workplace. “Human skills are not being taught in secondary school,” says Charlie Boyle, CEO of CXEI, which provides training in customer service. “It’s not a war between digital and human skills, it’s a walk. We must walk together.”
Mariana Costa Checa, co-founder of Latin American social enterprise Laboratoria, says, “Digital and life skills are both needed ‘to build a human’.” Laboratoria supports women from underprivileged backgrounds to learn in-demand technical skills and launch careers in STEM. “The technical is just an excuse—it’s the personal transformation that empowers them to go out and build their careers.”
The launch event concluded with a keynote address by Van Ton-Quinlivan, a recognized thought leader in workforce education. Now CEO of Futuro Health, Ton-Quinlivan began her career in the private sector before moving to the public sector. This trajectory, she explains, has allowed her to “reprioritize workforce education from a practice to a policy problem.”
“Tackling workforce issues is a team sport, not an individual sport,” says Ton-Quinlivan. From employers to educators to community-based organizers, “each of these parties needs to do what they do best, not everything.”
And this is precisely why the GOI was founded—to convene discussions, curate best practices, conduct world-leading research, and help member organizations do what they do best: uplifting millions of workers around the world.
Learn more about how to become a part of the GOI here.
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