Hire better in 2023: Lessons from Generation CEO Mona Mourshed

This transcript, generated from speech recognition technology, has been edited for web readers, condensed for clarity, and may differ slightly from the audio.

Linda Lacina: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. Today's leader: Mona Mourshed, the head of Generation, a non-profit bridging the gap between job openings and the unemployed. She'll talk about the surprising labour gaps that aren't talked about nearly enough, and what she's doing about it.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favourite podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Mona Mourshed: Look at the hire that looks different and then understand the implications of how they were able to break through the recruiting process, and then how do you do more of that?

Linda Lacina: The job market has been a hot topic in recent months, but while headlines speak of 'quiet quitting' and the 'great resignation', little attention has been spent on the millions of unemployed all over the world.

Mona Mourshed knows this well. She's the CEO of Generation a global non-profit, supporting welfare and opportunity through careers. The group trains and places adult learners and others into careers that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Started in 2015, the organization has now placed 68,000 graduates in 16 countries with an 83% job placement rate — all within three months of the programme's completion.

Mona will talk about the model her organization uses to tackle stubborn unemployment gaps and what leaders shouldn't overlook when it comes to upscaling new categories of workers.

She'll talk about all that. But first, she'll talk about skill gaps and how some of the biggest economic disruptions ahead could impact them.

Mona Mourshed: Before you can even talk about the skill gaps, you have to think about how someone is able to even get into a position to be interviewed for a role, right? And that is often one of the things that we're grappling with. We have 9,000 employer partners across our 16 countries, and what we found is that typically they're dealing with challenges of scarcity, you know, so they want to hire a hundred people, but they can only find ten. That might be something that is particularly characteristic of the tech sector.

In other cases, we're dealing with high churn professions — an example might be healthcare. And then there are also professions where there's great degrees of variation in productivity and quality outcomes. So that might be skill trades or it could be manufacturing and so on.

So, for each of those employers, what they're trying to do is to find enough pipeline to be able to serve their needs. And then, on the other hand, what we're trying to do is to support adult learners who have faced a myriad of challenges in their lives in order to be able to be trained for those professions and then get their foot in the door.

What we typically find is that even when employers have these three challenges of scarcity or churn or productivity quality, often you're dealing with an algorithm at the HR level that is screening them out because they don't have the right trigger words, if you will, in their CV, or they came from an education background that's not consistent with what employers typically hire for these roles.

So, a lot of what we're trying to do is to say, look, where someone has been, the pedigree of their education, of their training, that's not the main event. The main event is whether they can actually do the job, and let's find different ways to demonstrate their skills, such that employers and our learners and those like them can make a match.

And so it's often these recruiting processes that we seek to overhaul and partner with our employers, in order to find different ways that they can get the talent.

Linda Lacina: And what does that look like, when you're helping them to adapt their recruiting protocols? So many companies, especially recently have, been very public about, ‘hey, you know what? We were maybe over-recommending that new candidates have a certain degree or a certain sort of training,’ and realizing that maybe they were overbuilding on some of these things. How do you work with folks to keep going in that direction? What do you say to them and what sorts of changes are they making?

Mona Mourshed: So, first of all, it's not easy. Second is that we very much try to make interviews be demonstration based. So whether it is role plays, whether it's about going to someone's GitHub portfolio to see their tech work, whether it is scenarios that employers are creating. But it's all about, ‘let me show you what I can do, as opposed to you looking at my CV and assuming what I can do or cannot do based on where I went to school’ or based on what profession, background I have. And that's, by the way, equally important for those who are just starting out in their career, as it is for those who are mid-career, who may have been working, let's say, in logistics for the last 10 years, and now want to shift to the tech sector, want to shift to a different profession.

It's all about let's be demonstration based so that you can actually see the mastery of skill that they have.

Linda Lacina: How do you approach those conversations with these companies? Because I would imagine that folks have the protocols that they've, built up into a sort of a muscle memory or a tradition about how a company sort of, embarks on certain tasks. How do new habits get created? Because it has to be more than training. What does that process look?

Mona Mourshed: So, we have what we call a desperation index, right? Which is how desperate is an employer to be able to tap into a new pipeline of talent. And so, as you might imagine, the higher that number is on the scale of one to ten, the better it is from our perspective of being able to look at alternative pathways. So the first implication is that it has to be an employer who is feeling great desperation to want to do something different than what they're doing today, because otherwise they won't grow the way they want to grow, or they won't be able to achieve whatever outcomes they're seeking to achieve.

Then for those who have that high level of desperation, then it's about really partnering with them to figure out, okay, so how do we figure out ways to demonstrate the skill? And I want to be really clear. It's easier to be able to put in place a recruiting algorithm that's just screening through thousands of CVs, and saying, okay, here's the curated ones. And these are the ones that you should go after. It's much easier to do that than it is to engage in whether, you know, it's the hackathon for the recruiting exercise or whether it is looking at someone's portfolio, that takes more time. But the reality of the talent market today, and the employer needs for skills is such that we have to be willing to put in that time to get the talent that companies need, and also to enable the kind of opportunity that societies also require, so that we advance together.

Linda Lacina: I think if you asked any one person, are you inclusive when you look at hiring? Every single person would say, well, of course. It's as if you ask someone if they're kind, right? Of course, everyone is going to say that.

But clearly there's blind spots, clearly there's massive gaps, you know? How do you get to that mindset shift? Because before they even start the work, they have to agree that there's something to work on. How do you get to that?

Mona Mourshed: So your kindness example, made me think of how parents think about school choice. So, I used to work in K12 and typically when you ask parents what they think of the school system in which they're in, they'll say, oh, it's terrible. But then when you ask them about their child's specific school, then they'll say, oh no, that's great. And it's because how could you make a choice for your child that is not a good one.

There has to be some level of return involved in this, and so you have to believe that the cost per hire is going to be lower if you try something different. You have to believe that the retention rate is going to be higher if you engage in this. You have to believe that you're going to have greater promotion trajectory if you do something like this. And so, one of the things that we do within Generation is we actually track that return on investment as well for employers. And that's an important part of the case. So, it isn't just that I believe in diversity. You know, we want all of society to believe in diversity, but you also have to understand why that's a good thing. Why is that a positive thing.

I'll give you another example. Over the last 12 months, of our 9,000 plus employer partners, 65% of our employed graduates have gone to repeat employers. Why is that important? It's because they see it's not just because of hiring a different talent pool, but they're seeing that there is a return from doing that. And that is a very important part of this puzzle, because when you put both of those arguments together, the importance of diversity and the positive ROI, that's when it becomes compelling.

Linda Lacina: What would you recommend as teams are deciding what path they need to go for? If people aren't on the top of your index, as far as that frustration, are there tells that they can look at in their organization, even in the hiring process? You hear stories about jobs having maybe five to eight cycles of interviews to do a placement, right? Or maybe complicated projects that could make it more difficult for lots of different types of people to be hired.

Are there tells or questions that they can be looking at within the organizations and saying like, hey, you know, if we have this symptom, this sort of practice, we might be kind of going in an area we don't want. What should they be looking for?

Mona Mourshed: Multiple things. So, first and foremost is, and I'm focusing more on entry level roles here, where are the recruits coming from? Are they coming from campus-based recruiting? How many are coming from alternative pathways? And also, what are the steps in the hiring process and how long does that take?

I mean, we see hiring processes with some employers where, you know, it is three to six months before you get to a decision versus with some employers, it happens in two weeks. So, it is the steps and the length and where is the pool coming from? Because you cannot make a statement that says hey, you know, I want to hire diverse talent, but you're still hunting in the same pools that you've always been hunting in for the last decade. Those are inconsistent statements.

I would also say, it's important to understand how the path has looked once they have been hired. So, I'll give you another example.

Last year we did survey research on mid careers. So, age 45-plus individuals who are shifting careers and moving into new jobs. So, we surveyed across seven countries 1,400 hiring managers. We asked them, so when you receive CVs, what percent of the age 45+ CVs do you think are fit for purpose, not to be hired, but just to be interviewed. Only 15%. Then we ask them, okay, so of the age 45+ that you happen to have hired into entry level roles, how are they actually doing on the job, in terms of their productivity performance? 87% are performing as well, if not better, than their younger peers. 90% were viewed to be having as long retention potential, if not more, than their younger peers.

So what does that say? It's also important to look at the hire that looks different from what typically has been the case and see their performance in the company. And then understand the implications of how they were able to break through the recruiting process, and then how do you do more of that? Right.

These are all tells, to use your language, of what employers could look at to begin to say, okay, we should reassess and make sure that we are actually being consistent with all of these pieces of the recruiting puzzle.

Linda Lacina: So much attention over the pandemic, I feel like, was put on younger folks. Maybe their schooling was disrupted, maybe it was harder for teens to get jobs. It was harder to get entry level work and things like that, because those restaurants and things were shut down. But you didn't really hear a lot about older workers and so many of those folks left the workplace just altogether. They retired and didn't come back. Why do you think that is? Why don't we talk about older workers enough?

Mona Mourshed: I wish we did. I mean, when you look at the long-term unemployed across the OECD, 40-70% of the long-term unemployed are age 45 plus, and long-term unemployed, meaning that they've been unemployed for six months or more. So yes, there is a segment that just said, you know, I'm done with the labour market and I'm exiting, but I'll also say there is a very strong segment, large segment, that is searching for a job and they're not finding it relative to their younger peers. And that's a tragedy, because they have a lot that they can bring to the table. I'll also say that there's also very little programming in many countries across the world to support age 45 plus individuals to shift careers. You know, so this is not the case of, you know, I was an accountant and now I'm shifting to a new accounting job.

This is I've been working in retail, there aren't as many retail jobs because they're being automated, digitized, and I want to try my hand at tech. And so help me to get into that kind of a role. And as I just mentioned, there are a lot of biases in the job market that make it even harder for the age 45 plus person to be able to access a new job.

So, this is something we should be talking about much, much more across the world, particularly given that with healthcare outcomes, people will be working well into their seventies, right? And so, this is something that we, as a society, have got to figure out.

Linda Lacina: When we look at some of the narratives that came with the job changes over the pandemic, including like the Great Resignation, I think people liked the idea that like, yeah, people are saying, you know, power to the worker, I'm going to quit! The quitting narrative is fun, right. But it also maybe isn't so responsible because, there's what 200 million, people unemployed globally. The idea that we are not maybe talking about the most important problems. There isn't a lot of focus on, how do we solve for these issues? Why is that? Why do you think the attention isn't going, where it needs to be?

Mona Mourshed: Fully agree with you that there is a very strong narrative about the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, quiet quitting. So, you see that as headline news across the US, in parts of Europe, but I will tell you: the vast majority of the population, and particularly those who are in greatest need, continue to view a job as transformational.

It is an ability to achieve financial independence and move your life onto a different trajectory. And I think we get lost when we only focus on those headlines for a certain segment of the population. And we forget about, you know, the shoe-shiner in Sao Paulo who wants to be the Java developer, or the street seller of tomatoes in Kenya who wants to be a sales manager. And those are true stories by the way.

So a job continues to be one of the most important, if not the most important, way to change your life trajectory. And there needs to be an equally powerful narrative about that. It's not to deny that the Great Resignation and the Great Reshuffle and the quiet quitting is happening. It doesn't deny that at all, but it's about being balanced about the reality that the world faces.

Linda Lacina: And can we talk a little bit about, remote work, right. And particularly how remote work has a very special role in helping older workers, but also in sort of helping fill the skills gap.

Mona Mourshed: Remote work in our minds is really twofold. So obviously dramatically accelerated by COVID. There were already trends around gig work and remote work, but COVID just, you know, put it on steroids. And so when we think of remote work, we're thinking about it on two fronts. One is you are hired full time by an employer, but you are showing up at the office two to three days per week, right. And then there is the fully gig work, right? So, you are doing gig freelance work and that means that you have to be able to maintain a stream of these gigs so that it translates into the equivalent of full-time income.

When we look at our own graduates in some of our countries now, 40% of our graduates are going into either fully remote work or hybrid work. And so, we see this continuing. When you look on the employer side, there is obviously a lot of grappling and reckoning about how do you manage this hybrid work environment, because obviously people don't want to be in the office on the Mondays and the Fridays and so, it's how do you manage the Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. And no one's got a good answer for this, very clearly. Everyone is still trying to figure out, okay so if we live in this hybrid world, what does this mean in terms of how new hires coming in really absorb the work culture and the company culture, what does it mean in terms of progression?

So, I think the world is going to see a lot of movement here, but from our perspective, we see tremendous potential, in terms of being able to bring global opportunity, global work opportunity, to talent that lives in job deserts, to talent that lives in areas that lack those economic opportunities. So, we're actively trying to figure out how to make those matches between these populations.

Linda Lacina: Is there another sort of mindset shift that's needed from leaders? So, some of the remote work, not all, some of the remote debate, comes from folks that were just expecting things to snap back. They went through COVID and they're like, well, I'm sure this will return to whatever is normal that I was used to. Given that, employers who are more flexible and maybe look at, how they're resourcing and planning in a little bit more of a flexible fashion, will probably be better able to succeed in that environment. So how much of it also is to folks just reckoning with the fact that the change isn't over as far as the workplace is concerned?

Mona Mourshed: I think that really depends on the sector you're in. In the tech sector, I think that there is a full recognition that work is going to be hybrid. You know, whether it's going to be a couple of days a week that you come in or a couple of days a month, you know, depends on the company culture.

So now you go into healthcare world, and this is patient-facing. And so, is it going to be like that? Probably not. This is going to continue to be an area where you're going to be in person every day.

You look at customer service. Well, the tech part of customer service, so, the call centres, etcetera have been remote now. And I think that there are experiments of instead of going into the service centre every day, that perhaps you spend some of your time working remotely.

My point here is simply that this is a sector-by-sector tale that will be told. The disruption certainly isn't over and no one has fully wrapped their arms around, and I say this now, looking at our employer partners and what they're thinking through of what normal will look like over the next one to two years, let alone the next five to ten.

Linda Lacina: What are the top skills that you're helping to gear folks for? What are those top five skills?

Mona Mourshed: It's not so much about skills. It's more about professions. So, within professions, the professions where we see the greatest level of scarcity are typically tech roles. You know, so whether it is Java, Python, you know, software developers, whether it is, XR developers, or game developers and so on. So that's one area.

I think certainly within, just simply due to what's happened with COVID, you know, healthcare continues to have very strong surges, for multiple types of professions. Customer service is being heavily automated in many parts of the world. There is I think a bit of a reckoning there about what will customer service ultimately look like.

I think then if you go a level deeper, within each of these professions, we think of, there are technical skills, there are behavioural skills, there are mindset skills for each of them. And what I would say is that across the board, particularly with a view to remote work, personal responsibility is a behavioural skill and a mindset that there is increased desire for, because the more that you work remotely, the more you need to — so I would call it personal responsibility, and forward orientation, you know, which is your ability to make a plan and check your progress against that plan — those types of behavioural skills and mindsets will become very important, because you have to believe in a remote world that people are going to keep making progress, irrespective of whether they're sitting, you know, thousands of miles away from you or right next to you.

Linda Lacina: How can job hunters best stress that they can work independently? How do they demonstrate that to employers?

Mona Mourshed: There are multiple employers these days who actually who ask that question. You know, so do you have experience working remotely? What can you demonstrate and so on? And so look, there are a couple of things. Irrespective of, of age, right. One obviously is if you have already during COVID been working in a remote role and how you describe what you've been able to achieve during that time.

Second is just displaying how you manage your time, how you think about prioritizing different activities. What do you do when you have a problem and how do you find solutions, as opposed to get stuck in the problem and so on. So these are the types of things that employers are looking to see you having the ability to do, in order for them to feel confident of, okay you know, so this person, above and beyond the technical skills that are required for this role, are going to be able to manage in a remote environment.

Linda Lacina: Employers who are maybe, hesitant whether they realize it or not to hire older workers. What do you think is driving that hesitancy?

Mona Mourshed: So, there are two main parts to this. There is implicit and there's explicit bias. The implicit bias is that there is often a perception we find that those who are mid-career are not going to be as - and these are the words which are used, right - 'are they going to be as agile'? Or, 'we’re looking for someone who brings a fresh perspective.' We’re looking for someone who can really fit in. These are all code words for: we need a younger person often. And that is a bias.

Equally, I would say there's a bias against younger individuals. So, when you hear things like, well, we need someone who's more seasoned. We need someone who's, you know, been around the block a few times, you know? So, I want to be clear there's bias in both directions. By the way, this is also why in the research which I mentioned to you, the sweet spot for employers are those who are in their thirties, right. So they're not fresh out of school. They're not mid-career, these are the individuals who get the most attention when it comes to recruiting. But anyway, that is a bias that exists and it permeates all levels of the recruiting process.

The second thing I would say is, sometimes mid-career individuals themselves can get caught up in. I have been doing this same thing for ten years, can I shift into this new thing? And so how to support mid-career individuals to not only develop the confidence to be able to do this, but to also have the support system to be able to make this shift. So, both of these factors are at work and are at play in what is getting in the way of mid-careers being able to successfully enter into new roles. And so, we try to work on both sides of that equation.

Linda Lacina: For leaders and employers who maybe are listening to this and thinking about, what are my processes? You know, what maybe are implicit or explicit ways that we're keeping folks away? What do you think we could see in ten years? What sort of change would we expect? If we were able to sort of, bridge this gap.

Mona Mourshed: We would see an intergenerational workforce. For all roles, all levels. We would see demonstration-based hiring that, irrespective of who you are and where you've been and what your ethnicity is and what your age is, you're looked at with equity in terms of what you're able to achieve. And we would see that as individuals get promoted, that they are actually able to be viewed for what they can do as opposed to, again, their age, their ethnicity, their education background, and so on. I mean, this is all about breaking the bias barriers across all levels, not just what gets you in the door, but what keeps you there, what progresses you and so on. And we would see that across sectors, across professions, across countries. And then once we see that, then we would no longer have to do the types of things that we do today.

Linda Lacina: Tell us a bit about your background and what drives you.

Mona Mourshed: So I am Egyptian-American and my father indeed, he grew up in Cairo and faced a lot of adversity as a child. The only way he could progress himself was through education. He very much instilled in me that that is the path, right. And he became the first college graduate of his family.

I saw first-hand what education did for him in terms of enabling economic mobility and then, you know, fast forward to the days of the Arab Spring, in 2010. In the Middle East, we had 40% youth unemployment. Absolute scarcity of economic opportunity, and that spilled into the streets.

You saw the tremendous tragedy that people were facing because they could not create opportunity for themselves. And then that fire spread across the world. And, you know, you will recall the Occupy movement, at the time, which became global. And so -- I had previously been working in K12, and really focusing on increasing literacy and numeracy outcomes at the school system level, and then was seeing all of this and was realizing, okay, so I've been thinking that I just need to get people graduated from secondary school and then everything is going to be fine. And it's not fine. That's when I began shifting direction to looking at what I call education to employment, which is how do you bridge from the world of education into the world of employment, and just realized the education to employment system is broken, not just in the Middle East, but across the world.

And that's what led to Generation. And so, how could we develop something that is global, that brings together and literally takes each of the barriers that get in the way of education to employment and creates a solution around each of those. This is where our seven-step model was born. And that it works across professions and it works across countries and it trains and places people and ultimately can support tens of thousands of people per year. So that's what led to Generation.

Linda Lacina: Can you talk a little bit more about what's broken in that thing? Because I think it is something that you've spoken about before — this idea that folks believe that, 'hey, if I just go through the paces, if I'm responsible, I go to school, that's going to earn me a good career and a good life,' but that doesn't always happen. What is it that, is broken? What is that gap?

Mona Mourshed: First there is a gap between what employers need in terms of roles and professions, and then the skills required for each of them and what is taught in education and training systems across the world. Second, there is a gap in terms of the level of practicum. You know, so, and so when I say practicum, it's are we learning about the theory of something or are we actually learning how to do something? And so it's also in the content.

Then you have another gap when it comes to the hiring, which we've just spent quite a bit of time talking about. Which is like, what's the actual hiring process?

Then there is a further gap when you look at those populations who are in greatest need, who never had a great experience in education to begin with. And now they're trying- so now they're set back multiple fold, right? So, they may have a secondary school education that is purely general. And now they're trying to get into the tech job or the skill trade job or whatever it might be, but there is no connection to a job from that point where they sit.

So these are multiple of the things. And so, what we in Generation, what we do is we start with the job. Like the very first step is we go out and we mobilize jobs with employer partners so that we know where the jobs are and what they're in. Then we recruit people to come into our programme. Then they go through the bootcamp. It is three months profession specific. Then we support them to then interview with our employer partners. And then once they're on the job, we track the return on investment and that then fuels everything else to make the whole system better. And they get social support services along the way.

So, the point here is to say, what are all the parts, the gaps, that exist today and how can we almost vertically integrate those steps into a single solution to support those who have faced the most disadvantage. And that's the model.

Linda Lacina: You worked for McKinsey and you helped develop the office in the Middle East there. It's very entrepreneurial to be sort of building something like that from scratch, which I will get into, because I think it's important probably lessons learned to founding Generation, but what did that experience teach you?

Mona Mourshed: How to build. It taught me many things, but it is a very different skillset to build something versus manage something. And one of my mentors at the time, I remember telling me, you know, like in this world, there are two types of people. There are the builders, and there are the managers. I'm teaching you how to be the builder — and indeed he did.

Linda Lacina: What were those skills? What was the thing that really kind of stood out from what you had to learn new to build?

Mona Mourshed: You have to see your destination very clearly. You have to have a very clear vision of what is broken with where you are today, what it looks like, or what it should look like when it exists and how to be able to construct a path whereby you're going to face a myriad of challenges, but because you really believe in whatever that vision is you're just going to keep rolling and you're going to keep finding your way. You're going to get stomped on multiple times as you try to do that, but you're going to keep getting back up every time. And then, how do you also create a whole team of people who together are moving in that same direction, you know, that is fundamentally what I learned.

Linda Lacina: I always find it interesting because I feel like when sometimes people hear the words you're going to get stomped down, but you've got to keep pushing forward, people who build, understand what that looks like in practice, where there's lots of little stresses, little challenges, little moments where people get scared or where people get angry or stressed out, because the change is happening. They don't know where it's going. And if you had that in another situation, so say if you're working out right, we're very used to being tired and wanting to give up right. In a workout situation, we're all familiar with this and we're like, oh no, I can push through. And I'm familiar with this feeling, but in other settings, when we get to these little stressor points, these little breaking points, we don't recognize them and we just want to shut down. But people who are used to building they see those moments and they know that that's just part of change, and we'll solve this problem.

What do you think it is that it's hard for people to sort of see how change unfolds?

Mona Mourshed: That's a great question. If I just use your workout example, so that's just you, right. You know, it's you alone, but when you're building something, you're building it with a team and you're responsible for that team. The consequences are way beyond you alone. And so, you must now weigh every calculation, multiplefold. It becomes much easier to get lost as you're doing that. You have to think about, okay, well, should I make this trade off or do I make that trade off and so on? But then how you break through that is by harnessing the power of that team, so that you are collectively breaking through. So, it's not just you deciding I'm going to do more crunches, but it's actually you with your team saying like, no, that vision, whatever it is that we're trying to achieve: collectively, we all believe that we're going to keep powering through this.

That's a craft, right? It's not an art, it's not a science, it is a craft. And the only way you learn how to do that is by having multiple of these types of experiences and failures before you have that success. It's a very rich experience.

Linda Lacina: What's a way that you look to build that consensus? How do you organize people so that everyone is aligned and on the same page?

Mona Mourshed: It really does start with, you know, so if I just take Generation as the example, it really starts with a joint belief in what are we here to do. So, we are here to achieve a goal of supporting the economic mobility of adult learners across the world, and that's going to be really hard. And we understand what it means for that to be hard. And we understand that it means we're going to have to turn on a dime sometimes, because we're responding to some market signal versus that signal. And we collectively agree that a certain trade-off is necessary. Where it falls apart is if one person says, okay, well I think this trade-off works and then just runs with it.

We spend a lot of time as a leadership team, reflecting on, okay, this is what we're about, it's going to take massive levels of energy, but this is the right trade-off for us to make. And then you have to be able to make decisions quickly and you make that commitment too, right? We're not going to take six weeks to make a decision. We're not going to take six months, certainly. We're going to be taking this decision with this and within this timeframe. And here's how we're all going to work together to make that happen. And then sometimes it works out great and sometimes it doesn't, but we've done it together. And that's the point.

Linda Lacina: You mentioned that sometimes there's going to be points when your team needed to turn on a dime because of a market signal. Certainly, there were many moments of the last two and a half years where there were some shifts in priorities. Can you give us an example of one of those, and sort of what that looked like for your team? What was the challenge and how did you tackle it?

Mona Mourshed: So, the last two years has been like spinning on a dime consistently. It's not just turning on a dime. So I'll give you two examples.

So, the first is that when COVID first became known, and Italy was one of the countries that was hardest hit, right after China, so this was in February 2020, we began very quickly at that point thinking about how can we redeploy our curriculum and instruction team to create programming for healthcare professionals, so that they could learn what they need to know. So -- frontline healthcare professionals -- about how to treat patients with COVID and how to take care of themselves and I know that this all sounds very basic now, but this was at a time when it was all very new. There were manuals that you could read, but what they needed was like online practicums led by doctors and nurses saying like, here's how you put on your PPE. Here's what happens when there is a tear. Here's how you manage infection control and so on. So, we deployed in partnership with ministries of health and nurse and doctor associations, our curriculum instruction team, to create and to use the principles we've learned to create online content for nurses, doctors, labtechs and so on. And then we supported, healthcare professionals in about five, six countries. And so, we reached like 300,000 healthcare professionals in six months. This is something that we never thought we would do, but it became really important for us to be in service of our community. So that was one example.

The other was, like most of the world, we had to figure out how to offer our programming online instead of being in person. And so, that went through stages. So, it started just by teaching over Zoom what we were teaching in classrooms. But you can, as you can imagine, that was suboptimal. Then the next stage was to actually create content that was meant to be delivered online. So, it was 60% asynchronous, 40% synchronous. And then we delivered our programming that way across the world. And so, we had always been nervous since we started in 2015, and we'd always said, look, this programme is designed to be in person. If we do it online, we're not going to have the level of engagement we need and so on. We proved ourselves completely wrong. The outcomes of our online and blended programmes are nearly identical to those of our in-person programming in terms of graduation rates, job placement rates, job retention rates, income levels. So, those were two things, two big shifts that we made, and it was not at all clear that they were going to work. But I think we've learned something really important as an organization of how we slay our own sacred cows constantly in order to continue to innovate.

Linda Lacina: We talked a little bit about building, and of course these examples are, are all mini-builds. You did the big build with founding Generation. Can you talk about that decision a little bit and why you wanted to make that leap and why this was the right leap.

Mona Mourshed: At the time I was leading McKinsey's global education practice, based in the Middle East, and had just led an effort on education to employment. So, we had done cross country research, across the globe on education to employment systems. And this is where we had learned that there were very few education to employment programmes that could actually achieve both job placement and scale.

So, what we found was a lot of programmes delivered training alone, and they could reach tens of thousands, but they had a low job placement rate. And then on the other end of the spectrum there were programmes that trained and placed people into jobs, and had 70% plus job placement rate. But they tend to reach hundreds of people per year, and at the most, low thousands, you know, three to four thousand people per year. And so, our question was, well, could you. achieve something in the middle? Could you get to tens of thousands of people per year and be global and have an 80% plus job placement rate and so on.

And so that was the concept for Generation. And at the time, McKinsey was keen to double down on its social sector commitment and wanted to found a non-profit. And so, I came forward with an idea and said, okay, well, what if Generation is the first idea? And so that's how it began. So, with the support of McKinsey, initially was able to then bring Generation into being, and then it became, obviously, its own effort from there.

Linda Lacina: What is that secret sauce that helps Generation be in that middle ground where it's able to be scalable globally and have that sort of impact?

Mona Mourshed: It's a couple of things. I mean, one is it's the holistic seven-step model that I mentioned before, right? Which is we start with the jobs. Then we recruit and train our people and it's practicum based and we provide social supports so that people can focus on their learning and we match them to jobs. And we then track the ROI and continue.

And we have now literally 20 million data points that we're able to track to show us what's working and what isn't. It is that fidelity to the methodology that makes it repeatable.

There is a reality that, you know, a Java developer in India needs to have the same mastery of content of a Java developer in Kenya, a Java developer in the US, of a Java developer in Mexico because employers have the same mastery demand for that role. So that also makes it global.

And then we are constantly learning across the system. Like, we'll take something from Singapore and take it to Kenya. We'll take something from Kenya, take it to the US. We'll take something from the US, take it to Spain, and so on. So that level of just constant learning and sharing across the system is also what enables us to deliver this.

And we're just getting started. We're partnering with governments to embed Generation inside the government skilling system. That is a huge priority for us, because it's about leveraging the existing assets of workforce systems so that the system overall achieves higher outcomes as opposed to our programme alone.

Linda Lacina: How have you changed as a leader throughout your career, in your mind?

Mona Mourshed: Part of it is about you may have an idea of where you want to go, but that idea is meaningless unless there are legions of people with whom you work and engage both inside your organization and stakeholders, who also believe in that too.

There's another important lesson, I think, around pace. What is the metabolic rate of change for an organization and finding that happy place where, you know, you're pushing enough as an organization to continue to advance, but not so much that you are causing stress in the organization, you know? So, just how do you manage that pace and balance, is also another important one.

And then three, I think just always identifying, you know, what is it that makes someone a rockstar, right? And how do you first identify that in each person and then really harness it and create enabling conditions so that everyone can be a rockstar every day in whatever it is that they're doing.

So those are some of the things I've learned and continue to learn.

Linda Lacina: If you were going to give any message to folks listening to this, if there's one thing that they should be understanding from you in this moment, what is it?

Mona Mourshed: I would say if you are looking to change careers, make sure that you find a place that will train and place you in a job as opposed to train you alone, because it requires more than skills to be able to make that level of a transition.

If you are an employer, I would say, if you really want to attract a new and different pipeline of talent, then recognize the magnitude of what that means in terms of changing how you recruit, and really scrutinize what's happening in your system, or in your process.

If you are a policymaker, think about what are the job placement and income outcomes of your workforce system. I mean, one, do you have the data to know what it is and is it where you want it to be? And if not, then what types of radical things can you do to change that? So that's what I would say.

Linda Lacina: That was Mona Mourshed. Thanks to Mona and thanks so much to you for listening. A transcript of this episode and my colleagues' episodes, Radio Davos and the Book Club Podcast, is available at wef.ch/podcasts.

If you liked this episode with Mona, check out episode 32 with Amazon Web Services training chief Maureen Lonergan. She talked about the sought-after digital skills workers must train for now to prepare for future needs.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Jere Johannson as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.

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