Inputs – Labour – Quality

National economic futures depend on how well nations develop the knowledge and skills of their people:

• China and India already produce over 5 million graduates every year

• Shanghai topped a recent OECD test for reading, maths and science for 15-year-olds, America was 17th, Britain a lowly 25th

The key is to get the right mix of skills – there’s plenty of media and professional graduates nowadays but where’s the job creators, the entrepreneurs and lieutenant managers

To complicate things further, we are seeing a growing talent mismatch

Western economies have built a workforce optimised for mid-20th-century national industries, yet the jobs now being created are for 21st-century global ones

We need knowledge workers, not factory workers, and there just aren’t enough of the former

Companies across the globe consistently cite talent as their top constraint to growth

 According to McKinsey, in the United States, 85% of the new jobs created in the past decade required complex knowledge skills – analysing information, problem solving, rendering judgement and thinking creatively – and with good reason

By a number of estimates, intellectual property, brand value, process know-how and other manifestations of brain power generated more than 70% of all US market value created over the past three decades