here in st. Gallen the first time I was
here was back in 2007 for the symposium
back then I was much younger probably
much more beautiful as well when I think
about it perhaps nowadays I’m a bit more
like that middle-aged old skinny man
that that lower was talking about
anyways I spent the past ten years
working as a tech entrepreneur in Sweden
and the past six years I’ve been working
on a I guess you could say a more subtle
kind of revolution which is the
revolution in recruitment or rather kind
of the bridge between education and
employment because if you think of it
many of the issues that we currently see
being expressed in the elections in the
United States
in the United Kingdom and probably all
of Europe are all related somehow to
access to opportunities and I would
argue but the failure to provide people
with opportunities is the one promise
that the free world has failed to
deliver on to the people but why do
people expect opportunities in the first
place well in order to understand this
we need to go back a bit in time to the
19th century and back in the 19th
century the idea of a public access to
education came about and this book that
you can see up here I got it from my
grandfather
it’s a description of the fork Shula or
the the people’s school and this idea
that everyone should have access to
education you know that wasn’t
completely clear back then because the
hierarchies were in place you know you
had the elites and they were very happy
with their castles and their fancy
parties and and all that stuff but they
thought it was a good idea to provide
everyone with basic education for a few
reasons
so one of the reasons were to qualify
people for society another one was to
control the social order and to start
kind of building this social contract
between between the people and the the
government and the third reason was to
build good citizens so essentially what
this social contract said was that if
you invest your time and your energy and
your trust into this system we guarantee
that you will have access to
opportunities to jobs that you also get
to share the welfare that we create
together in this country but furthermore
with that promise came another promise
that hadn’t been around before which was
the promise of social mobility but it
wouldn’t matter that you were born into
a role it didn’t matter that you were
born a peasant because you would still
get access to the education and you
could still make that rags-to-riches
journey that that resonates very deeply
within people so for years and years
this system was built up in in a lot of
countries and I took part of it myself
there is a lot of students in here
and this is a this is my diploma I
actually managed to graduate with a
diploma that was an effort but it’s
interesting that back then I mean when
the system was built up the idea was
that you were educating yourself and
then you had one job for your entire
lifetime or maybe two jobs you know but
you’re supposed to have a limited number
of jobs but today young people are
expected to have four jobs by the age of
thirty and expected to have twenty jobs
within a lifetime and this has led to a
fundamental kind of restructuring of the
way that education is is done in the
world we’re moving from learning at one
point in life to lifelong learning which
is like going in and out in education
throughout life and to highlight what
this has done to the recruitment
industry because what happens is that
people learn in different ways through
different different means you know there
are online courses available these days
or you can do internships and you can
even be self-taught
a lot of the best developers in the
worlds that are hired by companies they
are they don’t have an education they’ve
they’ve taken the hard way of learning
but in the United Kingdom if you
graduate from a university there are 39
other graduates that are competing for
each and every job on average if you’re
going into one of the big famous swedish
tech companies then you’re competing
against 450 other people for that job
but my favourite example of how the
recruitment process is completely
upside-down is the government job in
India that had 2.3 million people
applying for three hundred and eighty
positions six thousand 250 people per
position how do you stand out in that
crowd you know oh I got a pink CV I’ll
stand in a I’ll send in a pressie or
something I hope they sort of see me in
the piles now and this is my folder we
all have one my folder applications
Seavey’s personal letters there are some
motivations begging for getting a job so
what I want to challenge is kind of this
whole process of how we match people
between education and work it’s like do
we feel that this is still fair do we
feel that this is still transparent and
do we feel that it’s a meaningful way of
spending our time and applying for jobs
but what’s perhaps even more interesting
is what happens to the social contract
and the guarantee that your that you’re
getting a job after your education when
you are in fact getting in line and with
hundreds even thousands of others in
order to get to that one opportunity so
we heard a bit earlier today about the
robots and this small robot here is not
gonna steal our jobs because it’s too
small I think it’s gonna steal our
circuit boards maybe and but I mean
whether the robots steal our jobs or not
because they might you know there might
be fewer jobs available in the future
but it might also be the case which we
are more certain of is that the
technology is changing the pace that
jobs are being replaced so that the jobs
that are available five years from now
10 years from now 20 years from now will
be vastly different from the jobs that
are available today which also increases
the kind of velocity that people will
switch between professions and also the
need for education and upgrading your
skills throughout your career so now
that we know that recruitment is an
awful process like the way it works why
don’t we see how we can fix it because
if people are waiting in line why can’t
we just make that process more enjoyable
and more fun even
rewarding perhaps we can even turn the
the application process into an
educational process so that you learn as
you go I think the first step towards
this is just to recognize for companies
and organizations that not everyone has
the traditional set of skills so in
order to pick up the people with a
non-traditional background the process
of identifying finding and giving a
stage to those people and a path into
the company is crucial so imagine if you
if you have a job ad and instead of
saying that we’re looking for an
engineer that has decent art skills blah
blah blah send in your CV and your
personal letter you can apply with your
by demonstrating your skills show was
what you can do and secondly if we
entertain the idea that we that we turn
this process into an educational process
imagine if you apply for a job at Google
and they kind of take you through all
kind of hopes and Hoops and and then you
end up in the top 5% of that process but
you don’t get the job wouldn’t it be
great if that would be a merit that you
could bring into the next process so
that you could build your skills and you
could build your profile as you go and
why not build your portfolio in this
example a design company was looking for
satellite designers and engineers so
they simply said show us what you can do
design us the satellite 1,800 people
designed satellites and of course only a
handful was selected for the opportunity
in the end but all the others got a nice
piece of work for their portfolio that
they could then bring onto the next
application so it becomes more of a
learning process and it’s interesting
how companies speak more and more about
employees as rockstars or you know
superstars this is actually my company
we are 60 rock stars we live the way we
always go to Finland for
karaoke that’s where all the magic
happens like because you you need some
karaoke in your life at some point but
companies speak more and more about
rockstars right and I think that this is
pretty characteristic for the era that
we live in the world’s most popular TV
format is American Idol it works in
every culture in every country
everywhere in the world if they’re
suicidal and one here participated but
it works you know in Saudi Arabia in
China in Sweden in the United States and
the reason for that is that it taps into
something much deeper in ourselves which
is the idea that anyone can become a
star and that is also the idea behind
the social contract of Education that
anyone can make the rags-to-riches
journey and if we elaborate a bit more
on this if you consider the United
States of America the United States is
built on the idea that if you’re
talented if you’re skilled and willing
to work hard enough you should be able
to achieve social mobility but I think
the question is are we ready to take
this idea to the world and can we and by
doing this can we open up so that
everyone will have access and truly have
equal access to opportunities thank you
very much [Applause]