Global Opportunity Forum celebrates two years of research and engagement
July 8, 2024
While public interest in workforce skills may have peaked during the pandemic, upskilling remains as relevant as ever, especially as technological and social change accelerates the rate at which demand for new skills rises and falls.
At the GOF, we have been helping businesses, policymakers, and educators navigate this new world of workforce skills since June 17, 2022, when the GOF launched in the United States.
In these two years, we have been committed to expanding access to learning opportunities so all workers—at whatever stage in their career—can learn new skills that lead to good jobs.
To achieve that goal, we have been conducting research, leading knowledge-sharing events, and developing curriculum with collaborators in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Here, we would like to celebrate our two-year anniversary and highlight some of the GOF’s major accomplishments and on-going projects.
Organizing employers and policymakers to grapple with shared challenges in workforce skills and learning.
We have helped organize and host four notable events, providing a forum for discussions about key challenges in workforce learning:
- GOF Launch—Online (Jun. 17, 2022): The launch was attended by roughly 300 experts in workforce learning and hosted panelists from prestigious global organizations, including the ILO and the WHO. Participants at the event shared best practices for addressing global issues in workforce learning, such as limited access to learning technologies and the need to include learners as participants in learning-program design.
- GOF Southeast Asia Launch, at the Third Integrated STEM Leadership Summit—Manila, Philippines (Nov. 3 – 5, 2022): The GOF organized and lead discussion panels on workforce development, and GOF Founder George Westerman delivered a “Distinguished Lecture” at the Summit, which gathered leaders across Southeast Asia to tackle challenges in STEM and workforce education in the region.
- Executive Roundtable—London, England (Jun. 21, 2023): Collaborating with MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program and British Telecom,
- 2023 MIT Research and Development Conference—Cambridge, Massachusetts (Nov. 15, 2023): At the premier research conference of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, the GOF hosted a half-day workshop that convened researchers (including renowned economist David Autor), business leaders, and job-seeking students to explore perspectives on the future of workforce learning.
Developing local ecosystems that efficiently deliver high-demand skills.
Throughout 2023, the GOF researched workforce-learning challenges faced in advanced manufacturing in the New England region of the U.S. Based on qualitative interviews with 30 leaders in manufacturing and workforce education in New England, the research produced a novel conceptual framework for determining how well-prepared a region is to teach advanced-manufacturing skills on a scale large enough to meet industry demand. The research, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), is helping to inform regional and national workforce strategy for manufacturing workforce development.
Discovering alternate career pathways to hard-to-fill jobs.
As part of another DoD-funded study titled AMPath, Researchers with the GOF are currently mapping how people move among occupations over their lifespans. This research can help to solve a key problem employers face: As technologies and professional practices advance, employers will need employees who have novel skills, but such employees are often in short supply, creating a skills gap. One solution is to find employees who can be quickly trained in new skills, often because they already have skills and dispositions that transfer well to hard-to-fill roles. The GOF hopes to identify these pathways—and thus to help close skills—by analyzing longitudinal data from more than 10 million unique employment profiles.
Developing an advanced-manufacturing curriculum in the Philippines.
Since 2023, the GOF has been building a curriculum and courses for a technical education program called AMDev, which aims to train 10,000 manufacturing operators and technicians in the Philippines. The international development agency USAID has funded AMDev with a $5-million grant for five years. So far, the GOF has released two courses, available for use among Filipino manufacturers, and plans to release three more courses soon after September 2024.
Sharing conversations, stories, and research on trending topics in the field of workforce learning.
The GOF has been running a podcast and blog series to update workforce-learning professionals on critical trends. The podcast has interviewed workforce researchers at MIT as well as industry leaders from organizations like LinkedIn and Workcred. The GOF blog has provided thought-provoking discussions, informed by recent research from MIT and elsewhere, presented in an accessible format.
Developing learning credentials that make skills visible and that employers trust.
As more employers move toward skills-based hiring, the way we certify and verify skills needs to improve. Traditionally, diplomas have served as the primary means for certifying and verifying learning, but they usually lack precise information about learners’ skills. To work on this and other challenges in credentialing, GOF founder George Westerman joined the board of Workcred in September 2023. Workcred is an affiliate of the American National Standards Institute and is leading advancements in workforce credentials.
This is just a small look at some of the work the GOF has done and the important work that will continue. The GOF will continue to build relationships with industry leaders, educators, and policy makers who have become strong stakeholders in continuing to build a better world for the billions of workers hoping to create positive change in the world.
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