Video: Is digital the answer to youth unemployment?

Twenty-five percent of all young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed, and finding ways to teach them new skills and find jobs is a global imperative, says Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation in this World Economic Forum video.

Here are some more quotes from the clip, and you can watch the full video at the top of this page:

On the digital economy:

In 1913 they were worried that with the industrial age it would kill jobs and people would forever be unemployed, and of course look a hundred years later what happened. I think we’re at an inflection point, where the concern that technology may be a job killer rather than a job creator – I think we’ll look back and smile at that 25 or 50 years from now.

We see the growth in the digital economy being a particularly robust place. The cable has just come in to East Africa within the last year or two, many of the governments said that they want to become e-governments so they will become employers of people, we hope young people, who have digital skills.

On reinventing education

Young people do develop differently, at different paces and to have every body in the same classroom because they’re the same age, starting at the same time of year, may actually not be the most efficient way or most effective way to galvanise the energy and excitement around education.

At the university level, everywhere is now the classroom. Professors are coming into online courses from all over the world and the students are interacting virtually; they are teaching one another, influencing one another, and I love the idea of crowdsourcing education.

Author: Judith Rodin, President, Rockefeller Foundation, USA.

Image: An internet cable is seen at a server room in this picture illustration taken in Warsaw January 24, 2012. REUTERS/Kacper Pempe