New Delhi, March 2023.

As a precursor to the upcoming 3rd Education Working Group meeting scheduled at Bhubaneswar from 24th to 27th April 2023, MSDE and NSDC organised a webinar on the topic- 'Mega Trends shaping future of work'.The webinar was attended by an esteemed panelincluding Shri Atul Kumar Tiwari, Secretary, MSDE, Shri Krishna Kumar Dwivedi, Joint Secretary, MSDE; and El Iza Mohamedou, Head, OECD Centre for Skills.

This webinar is the first of many events to take place leading up to the Education Working Group Meeting (EWG) in Bhubaneswar. The deliberations and discussions were divided into three sessions – Demographic and Social trends, Environmental trends, and Tech trends. In the first session, the speakers emphasised on increasing women participation in the workforce, harnessing the benefits of a multigenerational workforce and the potential of silver economy, while the second and the third sessions focussed on the asymmetric impact of skills within and across countries, employment in the light of the climate crisis, advent of jobs in green energy, and supporting vulnerable sectors. The experts also deliberated on the man-machine interface, skill shifts, assessing the readiness of the current workforce, firm adaptability; tech-enabled forms of work such as the gig economy and crowd-working platforms.

Speaking on the occasion, Shri Atul Kumar Tiwari, Secretary, MSDE said, the recent trends for global recovery and sustainable development have significantly emphasized accelerating the development of digital infrastructure, facilitating digital transformation, promoting responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship, and the need for/ reskilling and upskilling the future workforce. As a result, coordinated efforts are required at the global level to capacitate the existing education systems including foundational, Higher Education and Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) to provide pathways and opportunities for lifelong learning. This shall provide the youth and existing workforce with the necessary skills to adopt the new requirements of future work.Through this webinar and upcoming series of events, we aim to learn and deliberate on the best practices and policy interventions implemented by G20 nations to enhance their education and skilling ecosystem.

Addressing the webinar, El Iza Mohamedou, Head, OECD Centre for Skills said, Megatrends are shaping the future of work in unprecedented ways. This has made us realise that the skills demanded in the labour market will keep on changing and to stay ahead of the curve we need to keep upskilling and reskilling, making the concept of lifelong learning crucial, more than ever. Amid this transformation, governments need to promote skill-based culture and recognise all skills, even the ones developed with informal learning. The stakeholders also need to build a robust collaborative ecosystem with a focus on holistic integration of research and development, academia, employee organisations, and policies to ensure equal access to opportunities and skilling so that no one is left behind.

Overall, the meeting focused on identifying policies and practices across multiple themes for building capacities of institutions to strengthen foundational literacy and numeracy through a skill-based approach, promoting lifelong learning and establishing a digital skill ecosystem for creating a sustained, balanced, and inclusive world of work. The webinar also served as a platform to steer the discussion towards sharing best practices and strategic interventions for enhancing education and developing robust training systems to make our workforce ready for the future.

The three thematic sessions were moderated by Kanika Mahajan, Assistant Professor of Economics, Ashoka University:Anjal Prakash, Research Director and Adjunct Professor, Bharti Institute of Public Policy, ISB, respectively. The webinar concluded with a plenary session with Shri Atul Kumar Tiwari, Secretary, MSDE and Shri Krishna Kumar Dwivedi, Joint Secretary, MSDE addressing the audience. 

The sessions saw participation of eminent speakers like Amit Nirmal, DDG, DGE, MoLE; Narayanan Ramaswamy, Partner KPMG; Neeraj Sagar, Founder, Founder, Wisdom Circle; Sreedhari Desai, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior&Crist W. Blackwell Scholar, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School; Dr. NS Rajan, Former CEO - IDFC Foundation, Former Group CHRO – Tata Sons and earlier Global Leader - People Advisory – EY; Bhupinder Singh Bhalla, Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (TBC); Prof. Sumit Aggarwal, Professor of Finance, Economics, and Real Estate, National University of Singapore; Prof. Giovanni Marin, Associate Professor at UniversitàdegliStudi di Urbino Carlo Bo, Leader of the UNIURB research unit, SEEDS; Trishaljit Sethi, Director General, Directorate General of Training; Prof. Phanish Puranam, The Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Strategy and Organisation Design, INSEAD; Prof. Deepa Mani, Deputy Dean, Executive Education and Digital Learning and Professor of Information Systems, Indian School of Business.

While this webinar focused on identifying the trends that are shaping the future of work, the next one will focus on the steps and policy measures to be taken to imbibe foundational skills and lifelong learning capacity of the workforce in light of the impact of the emerging trends.

The G20 summit aims to bring global stakeholders representing academics, government, and industry on a common platform to contextualise the emerging future of work to prioritise reforms, re-imagine learning, and redefine talent.