Ten years is a long time in technology, but returning from my tenth World Economic Forum in Davos I was struck by the thought that although the world looks very different now, some of the challenges we faced in 2004 still remain.
At this year’s event I had a fascinating meeting with government officials from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan, alongside representatives from the Oil & Gas industry. It was interesting to hear these countries acknowledge the joint challenge they face in the future: all three must work out how to create a long-term and sustainable future. For Azerbaijan in particular, it is a case of turning an abundance of natural resources into a brighter future for the young people of the country.
At the heart of that transformation is the youth skills agenda. These three countries, like many others across the globe, must ensure that young people have the tools and opportunities to help drive their countries forward.
Around the world, of course, the challenge ahead is similar: how do we ensure that the next generation of workers has the right skills to succeed? It’s a question I remember asking at my very first WEF, and it’s now clearer than ever that IT skills are core to the answer.
The agenda for this year’s event was “Reshaping the World” and many discussions focused on how, in this rapidly shifting geopolitical climate, communities and businesses are looking to transform how they interact with each other, infusing their processes with greater transparency and efficiency. What was encouraging for me was the recognition from WEF delegates from a broad range of industries of the role technology can play in facilitating that transformation.
But our economy requires skilled people to use these new tools effectively. I firmly believe that access to technology skills, particularly for youth, is fundamentally important as we look to rebuild our economy. We cannot assume that recovery will be sustained without first strengthening our economic infrastructure, particularly in the parts of Europe hit hardest by recession. The Chairman of UBS, Alex Weber, stated in Davos that the Eurozone’s current pace of growth is not nearly fast enough to dent unemployment or set the region on a sustainable growth path, and the numbers seem to back that up.
Over 600 million jobs worldwide need to be created over the next decade to make up for those lost during the last financial crisis, and the European Commission has estimated that by 2020 as many as 90% of jobs in the EU will require digital skills. Through investments in computer science education and digital literacy training, followed by the support and tools required to turn that education into a career, we can ensure that the young people of Europe are the engine of recovery. Sustaining a collective response to the Davos Declaration on the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs marks the next challenge! The European Commission have invited corporate leaders to create an additional 100,000 traineeships for digital jobs by 2015. Microsoft is well underway with our pledge to increase the number of traineeships in Europe by 50%, from 9,000 to 13 500 by the end of 2015.
Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes was in Davos championing the very role that young people can play as entrepreneurs, provided they are equipped with the right tools. I strongly advise you to read her most recent blog.
What Ms. Kroes so strongly favours is the kind of public and private sector cooperation that can often be derived from collaborative engagements like the World Economic Forum. Microsoft goes to Davos to champion the transformative power of technology – from big data to the cloud and from devices to the services that businesses and consumers need – and it’s my hope that in some of the meetings and sessions in which I participated, I left other attendees with a better understanding of the role that businesses like Microsoft can play.
We believe that supporting youth entrepreneurship is a fundamental part of economic renewal, and that’s why we’ve been investing so heavily in technologies and programs such as YouthSpark and BizSpark, which support young entrepreneurs and enable the small firms they create to flourish. At events such as WEF, we ask global leaders to join forces with us to achieve common goals.
Economic prosperity is not the catch-all solution to societal ills that many people suggest. But in order to avoid a ‘lost generation’ of European Youth, our best bet is to give young people the tools and opportunity to shape the world they live in as a productive and dynamic workforce.