Closing The Jobs Gap – Transcript of Remarks by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at the World Economic Forum 2025 in Davos, Switzerland on 22 January 2025

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Thanks for the opportunity.

First, the scale of the challenge. We do have a looming crisis on jobs. 1.2 billion people in the developing and emerging world will enter the workforce in the next 10 years. 1.2 billion. It's without precedent. And on all reasonable projections, we'll be producing something like 400 million jobs. So, that leaves 800 million people. They'll probably find some way of filtering into the informal economy, or in some form of underemployment, or they'll be plain unemployed. And we know the consequences of that. They're not just about wages, they're not just about economics; they're fundamentally social and political, and they will shape a new international disorder.

It's also not just a crisis of jobs that we face, but a crisis of the social compact. It's a crisis of hope. Of self-belief and dignity. And a crisis of solidarity. So, we really have to recognise that this is a challenge that is not just for employment ministers, employers and unions. It's a much broader society-wide challenge, and it's actually an international challenge.

It means we have to address the jobs challenge through life and comprehensively. The fact is, if you look across countries, what you do to develop human potential through life shapes how well people do in jobs: whether they retain jobs, whether they're able to adjust to the churn in the job market, whether they end up feeling they've had a satisfactory career. Shape human potential through life. Don't wait for kids to leave school, or to come into the workforce.

That's actually the broader definition of the jobs challenge. We have to start early. We know the science, about the criticality of the first year of life and the first three years of life. I won't elaborate this, but that's critical to addressing the eventual jobs challenge: developing human potential early in life.

What happens in the school years too is critical. If you look at the countries which end up in the top five to ten places in the global PISA rankings—imperfect, but they're fairly good measures of how well school systems are doing - almost all of them are dominated by public school systems. The countries where the private schools are at the top, are not the countries at the top. The countries at the top are the countries where they've got public school systems - either universally or in the main - and with public schools at the top as well. Their excellence is not driven by private schools. And there's a very important lesson there because it shows that it is possible to provide a high-quality education on a broad base and to prepare whole cohorts for a life of doing well at work and gaining a sense of fulfilment from their careers

It doesn't stop at school. In other words, you don't just address this upstream and think that it takes care of the downstream. It requires continuous investment through life, in human potential.

And one of the big challenges we face all over the world is now a huge mismatch of skills. It’s in the advanced countries like the US, Europe, Britain, as well as in the better off developing countries like China; and in most of the low-income countries.

A huge mismatch of skills, and a mismatch of aspirations. People who've gone through education, invested some family resources, or had state resources invested in a tertiary education, then come onto the market and find they can't find jobs that match their skills and their aspirations. That mismatch of skills and aspirations is a major challenge, and if we don't solve it, again, we get more than an economic problem. We get a problem of a whole generation feeling the system has failed them. They put all that effort into a particular course of education, they can't get the jobs they want, and they feel the system has failed them. So, we have to take the mismatch of skills very seriously. It requires some basic adjustments, and I'll just stick to two.

First, it requires changing what we do before they end up in the workforce - what happens in tertiary education, or in post-16 education? There are a few examples like Singapore and some of the small northern European countries which are different, but in most countries, including China, India, and most of the West, tertiary education systems have not only been expanded but been overly academically oriented. They have neglected technical skills. So, we didn't just expand college enrolment internationally. We didn't just expand enrolment beyond the age of 16 in education. We also tilted it heavily to a highly academic model of education, that previously applied to a very narrow cohort of students, when university education was rare.

It reinforced public perceptions where academic skills are to be desired, and ranked above technical skills or the skills you acquire through experience. And that's at the heart of the mismatch between what people are trained for and what the job market and employers want.

It can be corrected. You've got to find ways in which the technical and applied route for learning is also a route to achieve the highest levels of excellence and expertise. That's the reorientation we need. And let's do away with another shibboleth. There's too easy an argument made, often by renowned academics or those who are the heads of Ivy League universities or liberal arts colleges, about how the traditional university education gives you more breadth and gives you the soft skills you take through life.

Soft skills and breadth are not the sole province of a traditional university education. They can also be developed through the technical route, through the applied route, or through a dual education model. There are many soft skills to be developed. Including learning how to develop strengths as a team, to meld different strengths in a team. The soft skills of being able to anticipate something, or adapt to what comes by surprise. There's a whole range of soft skills that take you through life.

There's a whole range within intellectual breadth as well, that’s not just about knowing the classics or the sciences, and feeling you're educated because you know both of them. There's a lot of breadth of mind that develops when you learn in a technical or real-world context, where you're having to toggle between different concepts, different technologies, and keep pace with the changing nature of the workplace. So, breadth and soft skills are not the sole province of the traditional academic education. We need both - I don't want to knock the traditional model, but it shouldn't be defining the broad landscape of higher education.

Then we come to what happens when people are in the workforce. Remember, we want to invest in human potential through life: start early, get public education right, get tertiary education right so that it's not slanted too much towards the academic model. But what happens when people are in the workforce, when they're mid-career, and when they no longer feel they are that young? Churn is going to continue in the workforce. In fact, dislocation is going to continue apace, and AI is a much more powerful driver of disruption than previous technologies have been.

We can't say for sure whether the displacement of jobs that AI will bring, will be larger than the way in which it complements jobs and helps augment human abilities. No one can say for now. In the short term, we'll probably get a lot of complementarity. In the long term, no one knows because AI will likely become more powerful, and be able to substitute for a much broader range of human tasks.

But what we can do is try to make sure that we develop skills continually now - so as to reduce the prospect of AI being so broadly substitutive at some point in the future, and to increase the prospect of AI being complementary to human skills. In other words, don't wait to see what happens 15 to 20 years from now; start acting now on skills development — when people are still at work, when they're still in their prime, they haven't lost their job, they haven't been dislocated. Invest now and invest continually, and that's what a few countries are now doing very seriously. I was at another session just now—we spoke about Singapore; we spoke about Denmark. They happen to be smaller countries because, I guess, we have the advantage of feeling a little more vulnerable, more exposed to the way technology and a changing world affects us. And so, we prepare in advance. But everyone, including the largest countries or the largest states within countries, can have that same mindset: invest in people continually, including when they're still at work.

I was looking at the Edelman survey that just came out. Many interesting dimensions to it. But one dimension is that when you survey ordinary people and workers about what they want in employers, it used to be largely that they want security and good pay. Now, equally important is that they want training and retraining—just as important as good pay. And there's some wisdom in that. People have sussed out what's happening and what they need to have a secure career.

Another priority: we have to find better ways to help those who are inevitably dislocated by trade, or by automation and AI - find ways in which skills and jobs can be regenerated. The market doesn't take care of this very well. It never has, particularly in large countries. So, find ways in which individuals and communities of people who've been displaced can be retrained and re-geared to new employers and new areas of demand.

It's been done quite well in some places. For instance, if you look at coal workers whose jobs are being phased out. In places as diverse as the state of Saarland in Germany, the eastern province of Mpumalanga in South Africa, and in Korea—in each of those cases, they've made deliberate efforts to retrain coal workers for a range of other jobs. In Saarland, it was regearing them for the auto industry. In Korea, it was giving them the skills to work on transmission lines and distribution in the power sector, including for renewable power. And in South Africa, they received a range of other technical skills that could give them new jobs.

So, that too has to be part and parcel of economic strategy, and of governments working together with businesses. Creative destruction is part of a healthy economy, but the creation often happens in a different place from the dislocation, and we've got to take care of the communities whose jobs have been dislocated and help them to get back in. That is basic to what you might call industrial policy.

The final point I'd like to make has to do with informal workers. The reality is, the starting point is as much as 80 percent of workers in the developing world are in the informal sector. No security of employment, often no skills curve to move up on, and typically underemployed as well, not really working full time. It would be unrealistic to think, under any economic strategy, that we're going to be able to convert all of them into formal employment soon. But we've got to reduce the gaps in quality of jobs between what we think of as an informal sector and a formal sector.

The formal sector has rules to provide some security, including social security, and some obligations on the part of the employers to provide workplace injury compensation and the like. We've got to reduce the insecurity of work in the informal sector. And particularly, with platform workers and so-called gig workers. We've done it in Singapore, ensuring workplace injury compensation and mandatory social security contributions - made it mandatory for the young gig workers, but for older workers, we let them opt in because it's still good for them. And encourage platform operators to take the responsibility to build up skills over time for these workers. Technology is an enabler for the informal sector as well. From the street hawker to the taxi driver, to the delivery worker, we can improve productivity in the informal sector so as to improve incomes.

So, let's reduce that sharp bifurcation between the informal and the formal sectors. We're not realistically going to convert everyone into the formal sector, but we can reduce that bifurcation and enable more people to be on a curve through life, where they gain skills, they gain incomes, and they feel they have some control over their lives.

So, let me stop there. I think the jobs challenge is a very serious one, but it's one of these things that's doable because we've seen how it's done well in some places, and we can apply those lessons or adapt those lessons elsewhere.

It's also unlike some other contentious issues in geopolitics and geoeconomics. Very few countries can object to another country doing what it can to build up skills and capabilities and provide good jobs. That's actually the best form of industrial policy: build up our own capabilities, and even try to achieve superiority of skills and capabilities, rather than try to hold the other guy down.