Cultivating Talent to Spur Smart Growth
A panel session entitled “Cultivating Talent to Spur Smart Growth” was held on the first day of the Jubilee St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The participants discussed how the people need to change themselves and the attitude of others towards them in these new circumstances, what does education look like today and what it serves for.
The session was moderated by Stanislav Shekshnia, Affiliate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at INSEAD School of Business, who made several conclusions based on the session results. In the first place, knowledge about human capital is highly uncertain: it is hard to understand what a modern young person is and what skills he/she needs. Secondly, the session participants agreed that a quality basic education can prepare people to face this uncertainty, while good skills would form a basis for good performance. Thirdly, in today’s world professional competencies are complemented by other competencies such as leadership, innovation, which means openness and ability to experiment, setup for cooperation and drive – ambitions coupled with independence.
It should be borne in mind, Mr. Shekshnia stressed, that speaking of “the human capital, we speak about particular people and personalities”. Human capital development is a process that should go on for the entire life. For the state to have a world-class human capital, it is necessary to ensure cooperation between the family, school, business, state and society.
Blair Sheppard, Global Leader for Strategy and Leadership Development at PwC emphasised several important aspects that the generations to come should keep in mind: determination of human value in case android machines are invented, markets alignment with global economic theories, and population division into social categories: the rich will be getting even richer, and the poor – even poorer.
Sergey Kravchenko, President of Boeing Russia/CIS, stated that the society needs corporate business with a great number of leaders, while the computer education and human ability to work and learn quickly will be evolving more and more actively. He also noted that human capital is developed through large-scale tasks and mentioned the Cold War as an example.
Artyom Khromov, Chairman of the Russian Union of Students and Member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation spoke on behalf of those who are getting their education at the moment. He reported that many students are dissatisfied with educational services and fear they won’t be able to get worthy jobs. Mr. Khromov described the process of new electronic system development, which will allow employers to select students who fit their objective parameters – real academic performance, research activity, performance during internship. Mr. Khromov stated the possibility of creating databases that would allow summarizing and recording human capital data.
