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This white paper provides an overview of learnings from the World Economic Forum's Closing the Skills Gap 2020 project. It summarizes the endeavour to uncover where, in a landscape of often divergent efforts, there is an opportunity for collective action to strengthen reskilling and upskilling initiatives. It includes case studies and lessons learned from various industries, impacting a range of stakeholder groups in multiple geographies. The white paper also details the project's successful completion and integration into the World Economic Forum's Reskilling Revolution Platform.

The white paper is structured as follows: The first section introduces the Closing the Skills Gap 2020 Business Commitment Framework, providing a brief overview of the issue and the objectives of the collaboration. The second section explains how different metrics may be aggregated and adapted to measure the success of skilling, reskilling and upskilling programmes. The third section elaborates on the overall impact achieved by the project and learnings from the programmes submitted by participating companies. The final section concludes by highlighting impactful ways to collaborate to close skills gaps, its relevance to all stakeholders, and how these lessons have been integrated into the World Economic Forum's Reskilling Revolution Platform.

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Understanding of the platform economy has been held back by two key issues: lack of definitional clarity and lack of data. This white paper focuses on definitional issues, in line with the objectives of our Platform Work project. It maps the different categories of digital work/service platform and the business-model-specific and cross-cutting opportunities and challenges they pose for workers. It is designed to help policymakers and other stakeholders be more informed about such platforms and about the people using them to work; to support constructive and balanced debate; to aid the design of effective solutions; and to help established digital work/services platforms, labour organisations and others to build alliances.

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This paper argues that the current moment offers a strategic win-win opportunity to proactively enhance gender equality and prevent widening gender and skills gaps. To navigate the uncertainties and new opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, all sectors need to increase diversity within their talent pools and their leadership. In order to make the most of this moment for improving business performance in high-growth sectors and supporting progress towards gender parity at all levels of employment, it is critically important to understand the barriers hindering parity across distinct sectors and job families and to harmonize strategies for effectively overcoming these hurdles. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for enhancing gender parity in sectors likely to exhibit high growth in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and identifies key acceleration strategies by sector. Furthermore, it highlights examples of successful implementation through diverse and complimentary instruments to inspire action for rapid progress.

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is blurring the lines between people and technology. The impact of those changes on the way people work and businesses produce value spans all industries, economies, and societies and redefines the future of work. This paper represents an initial response to the changing role of organizations in the context of this challenge. It explores why the 4IR creates the impetus for transformation in people strategies and HR practices; outlines what business leaders can do to respond; and describes how organizations are already responding to the need for change, with examples of emerging roles, technologies and critical skills for the future of HR.

The paper identifies six key imperatives that business leaders, partnering with their human resources counterparts, will need to implement: (1) developing new leadership capabilities for the 4IR; (2) managing the integration of technology in the workplace; (3) enhancing the employee experience; (4) building an agile and personalized learning culture; (5) establishing metrics for valuing human capital; and (6) embedding diversity and inclusion.

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The full benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution can be realized and broadly shared only if the workforce is provided with adequate opportunities for continuous training and is fully engaged in the processes of designing and implementing advanced manufacturing technologies and changing work systems. This will require new forms of collaboration from business, labour, education and government stakeholders. In this paper, the World Economic Forum establishes six guiding principles to support the creation of international standards for lifelong learning and worker engagement in advanced manufacturing. The examples provide evidence of how some of these stakeholders are already working to manage the transformations in technology and work in this integrated fashion.

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The [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic - and the ensuing economic disruptions and social and political unrest - has brought to centre stage issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, pressing business leaders to take action on social justice. It has quickly become a top business imperative to help create a more fair, diverse and inclusive society. For companies, ensuring greater parity in the post-pandemic era starts at home. Accordingly, this white paper provides an integrated four-step strategic framework as well as a comprehensive overview of measures that organizations can implement today to improve diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice for their workforce.

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This white paper presents various possible visions of what the future of work might look like by the year 2030. Based on how different combinations of three core variables - the rate of technological change and its impact on business models; the evolution of learning among the current and future workforce; and the magnitude of talent mobility across geographies - are likely to influence the nature of work in the future, the paper provides a starting point for considering a range of options around the multiple possible futures of work. It is stressed that the scenarios presented are designed to create a basis for discussion among policy-makers, businesses, academic institutions and individuals; they are not predictions. Instead, they are a practical tool to help identify and prioritize key actions towards proactively shaping a new, positive future of work that maximizes opportunities for all across their working lifetimes.

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The way people work, the skills they need to thrive in their jobs and the trajectories of their careers are rapidly evolving. These changes are significantly altering the skills required by the labour market. Continuous learning lies at the heart of thriving in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While the skills required for most jobs are changing quickly, adult education and training systems are lagging behind. While 35 per cent of the skills demanded for jobs across industries will change by 2020, at least one in four workers in OECD countries is already reporting a skills mismatch with regards to the skills demanded by their current jobs. This white paper argues that, in order to create a robust and inclusive adult education and training system, leaders from across business, government and civil society need to start laying a common foundation through strategic and coordinated action. The paper lays out key pathways for change and illustrates successful examples of implementation to inspire broad-based transformation. The paper is the outcome of an international, multi-stakeholder dialogue series organized by the World Economic Forum. It draws upon submissions by leaders and experts who engaged in the dialogue and the latest thinking from a range of organisations.

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution has transformed production industries with breathtaking speed and scale. This white paper notes that a combination of powerful forces - both technological and macro trends - are altering where and how goods are made and shifting labour demand. Jobs will be displaced by automation across global production value chains, but there will also be pockets of job creation within the wider manufacturing ecosystem. However, widespread mismatches are likely between where new jobs are and where there are workers with the required skills, which creates a new employment challenge that could be particularly difficult for developing economies. This paper is based on a study using the fundamental building blocks of all production industries - global value chains - as the starting point to understand how the global production workforce looks today; and how it could look tomorrow. It aims to bring a new lens to the future of production employment by focusing on the shifts in the production value chain and the impact of key trends on different value chain segments. Through modelling, insights were gained about who will be impacted the most across global production value chains, where, and at what magnitude.

The study estimates that 16 per cent of jobs are susceptible across five production industries - automotive, apparel and textiles, consumer electronics, chemicals, and industrial equipment. Although a smaller number than other studies have predicted, it does represent nearly 50 million people across the globe. This paper aims to support a focused discussion on the future of employment and skills in production industries, enabling multi-stakeholder collaboration on targeted actions across different geographies and segments of the value chain to shape the production workforce of tomorrow.

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The cybersecurity industry is affected by the global shortage of workers and urgently needs to take actionable approaches to attract and retain skilled staff. The workforce shortage is a global concern that spans nation states and industries. Estimates suggest that by 2030 there could be a global talent shortage of more than 85 million workers, leading to an estimated loss of $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue. To address the cybersecurity workforce gap, the strategic Cybersecurity Talent Framework (CTF) aims to present actionable approaches and best practices to public and private decision-makers worldwide on how to cultivate and sustain a pipeline of skilled professionals.

More specifically, the CTF is structured around four key priority areas intended to provide a holistic approach to talent management in cybersecurity. Among other things, the priority areas explore how: (1) More talent could be attracted into cybersecurity by improving the understanding of what cybersecurity professionals do, removing barriers to entry and improving diversity in the workforce; (2) Cybersecurity education and training could be improved to effectively equip students and professionals with essential skills for a career in the field; (3) Recruitment practices could be rethought by addressing challenges such as unrealistic and demanding requirements in job descriptions and misalignment between hiring managers and human resources (HR) departments; and (4) Retention of cybersecurity professionals could be improved by tackling issues such as the lack of appreciation and recognition for the field as well as the high stress levels.

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