This panel discussed talent markets, focusing on Brazil, Mexico, and different countries in Africa.
Technology is providing the means for talent markets to become truly global. Jeremy Johnson, CEO of Andela, which trains software developers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda and provides global tech companies access to this talent, said they operate on the principle that “brilliance is evenly distributed around the world.” The software engineers that Andela places work as “distributed team members,” he explained, living in different parts of the world so they are not required to leave their home country.
Thogori Karago, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, the professional networking platform present in over 200 countries with 546 million members, noted: “Freelance is growing at a phenomenal rate. In the future people will probably not work for companies. People will probably work for themselves, and probably for multiple companies.” Another trend she pinpointed: “There’s a massive migration of tech talent from Asia to other parts of the world.” As micro-credentials get more popular, a neutral party may be needed to evaluate and credential them on a trans-regional basis, she said.
Turning to Brazil, Mauricio Escobar, Co-Founder of Anima Educacao, a higher education provider with over 100,000 students, said its new students often lack information about what skills they need to enter a profession. “The first thing is to assess the student to make them more aware of the track they will have to follow, and then we have some platforms to help them,” he said.
According to Leo Schlesinger, CEO of Aliat Universidades in Mexico, which has over 50,000 students, Mexico’s economy is too reliant on cheap manufacturing labor, jobs very likely to become automated. Half of Mexico's labor market is informal and almost 90 percent of those workers did not complete high school, he added. “Employers, students, and academia are living in parallel universes today,” he said, creating skills mismatches and shortages. He predicted that most jobs in future will come from smaller companies, from start-ups, so more students need to become entrepreneurs.
