Presenter: Saul Garlick, Founder and CEO of Unleesh One of the biggest issues facing today’s job landscape is the global skills gap. With nearly 95 million underemployed and unemployed low skilled workers unable meet the requirements of over 85 million open positions, both individuals and the economy are desperate for a solution. While this gap doesn’t appear to be shrinking anytime soon, leaders from all sectors are working hard to find potential answers to this disastrous problem. Saul Garlick and his team at Unleesh are one such organization dedicated to training potential workers, as well as providing a platform of knowledge gathering for current employees. Through Unleesh and other similar organizations’ dedication to talent building, then, it is only a matter of time before long-term solutions begin to fill the global skills gap. The way we define “people” needs to be changed. When it comes to work, employees are often viewed as commodities, inputs, machines, and things that simply do things. However, viewing workers more as humans and less as robots is beneficial to both individuals and the organizations they work for. Even low-skilled workers have something to offer. Whether it is the context of a local area, social connections, access to certain institutions, or a specific set of skills, all workers have something to offer. And through exposure and experiential learning, any worker can be trained to a specific task. People around the world view themselves as human, not simply as workers. While many companies may treat their employees as a means to an end, employees don’t necessarily view themselves as such. If organizations can learn to treat their workers as multifaceted humans, they will be able to not only strengthen their bond with their employees, but also potentially discover new skills and talents that could be beneficial to the company.  Immersion, collaboration and knowledge sharing is essential to successful companies.  Immersion is the best tool for working and learning. During a trip to rural South Africa to develop social impact projects, Garlick discovered several key insights into immersive learning: first, that students develop meaningful, life-long relationships with each other and locals when working as a team; second, that anywhere you go, people are looking for a decent job; and lastly, that people learn a tremendous amount when they are deeply engaged in a collaborative process. Companies that codify proprietary knowledge and skills and transfer them to their employees will be the most successful. By making company knowledge public to their employees, organizations are able to not only pass down key knowledge to future generations, but also harness the brain power of their entire organization to create new solutions and opportunities. “The companies that are going to be successful in the knowledge economy are the ones who know how to capture their proprietary knowledge and transfer that information seamlessly to their workforce.” – Saul Garlick Mobile-first platforms are key to building talent in companies. Due to the near-universality of smartphones, Unleesh has created a mobile platform that enables workers to engage with each other and their companies in an effort to continuously gather knowledge and learn new skills. In the near future, every individual will have access to a smartphone. GSMA Intelligence projects that Africa will have 720 million smartphone users by 2020, with areas such as Latin America and Asia nearing this as well. Similarly, it is estimated that smartphone broadband will cover 60% of all cellphone users by 2020. A mobile platform can be used anywhere, anytime. In addition to its ease-of-use, Unleesh can also be accessed in areas without Internet connection. Continuous learning through continuous training. In order to increase retention of information, Unleesh provides users with bit-sized pieces of information to encourage micro learning. They also provide training and engagement of teams in simultaneous locations in order to promote similar learning experiences for all employees. Increase socialization. Studies show that 80% of workforce learning happens through interactions with peers, teammates, and managers. Therefore, social interaction and engagement is crucial to continuous learning. With Unleesh, employees can both learn from the heads of their company as well each other in order to increase general knowledge. Collect and leverage deep data analytics. In order to help companies best understand their employees, Unleesh runs reports to find key insights into an organization’s employees and how they can better maximize continuous learning. Unleesh is only one part of the solution to the global skills gap. In addition to talent development companies, government and non-profit involvement is also crucial to filling the global skills gap. In order to do this, investment needs to be made in people, not automation. “The more we learn about the different choices employees might make in different scenarios, how they think about different problems and proposals, the more we can inform the enterprise on how to be better, faster, and smarter in the knowledge economy.” – Saul Garlick To read or download the rest of the essays from this special report on the Future of Work and Education, download our free app on your favorite device (iStore, Google Play, and Amazon Kindle) or click to view the Digital Edition.