Bridging the Gap Between Market Needs and Workforce Skills

everyone thank you for joining us today I think the best thing to say now is for you probably because it's lunch time think of this session as a huge delicious meal and indulge um my name is Usama Ali and I am the programs and accreditations director at adgm Academy and I'll be moderating to today's panel discussion titled Bridging the Gap between Market needs and the workforce skills the challenge in aligning Workforce skills with the market needs has never been more pressing in fact as Industries change and economies evolve it is evident that for businesses and educational institutions as well as governments we all have to come together to ensure that the workforce is ready to meet those Market needs today we are joined by an outstanding group of experts from various sectors who will be bringing their ideas and expertise to live so let me introduce Dana day managing director of the CFA Institute Ute with vast experience in finance and investment sector Dr Ahmed sh executive director of the higher education sector at ADC driving the alignment of higher education with Market needs stanos CEO of polling capital a leader Investment Management focused on identifying and developing Talent last but not least Su hos vice president of strategy and future at the higher colleges of Technology who's shaping strategic initiatives within the education sector our conversation today will explore how these sectors businesses education institutions and governments will work together to align and to ensure that the workforce is ready for tomorrow so with that let's begin we'll start with you Dana so as the managing director of the CFA Institute you've been at the Forefront of shaping Professional Standards in the finance sector the question is how can education institutions and training providers equip Professionals for the future challenges of the industry thanks AMA it's an honor and a privilege to be here in to see some friendly familiar faces so thank you uh I think when you think about shaping the shaping talent for the future you really have to to do that from the inside of the industry you have to understand the industry from the inside out meaning you have to be a part of it and so CFA Institute uniquely sits at the Nexus of Industry practitioners and education and learning and I think when we walk around the world we we talk to all kinds of organizations around the world and we really see the need for talent in five key places so if I'm a person standing in this room today or thinking about my future in this industry whether I'm Skilling or upskilling five key spots first private markets you cannot escape a conversation today without thinking about what's happening with asset flows in private markets if I'm Skilling myself that's where I'm focused private wealth look at demographics around the world and look at how they're changing anticipating that that's a that's a space where we need to skill sustainability goes without saying climate change is real and we have to prepare ourselves now for the challenges of the future whether that's from a risk or evaluation perspective fourth one is technology and AI again you can't escape a conversation today without thinking about the impact of AI on the the investment industry and finally underpinning it all ethics and integrity we cannot create a financial services industry that our clients can trust unless we have ethics and integrity and that is a place that we need to demonstrate knowledge and skill excellent thank you Dana now I think what I would like to do is link that to what Stan um would have to say considering you are from the CFA Institute you're from the investment and finance sector so Stan you lead pollen capital A prominent investment management firm how do you ensure that your team remains equipped with the necessary skills to thrive in a fast evolving industry yes thank you you one of the things I like to think about at uh Poland capital is reflecting on my own experience entering the industry I hold a CFA Charter I have an MBA I have a masters in global and then when I entered the industry I was very technically trained but I would say my EQ skills had not been trained and over the years I worked diligently and very hard to develop more of my EQ skills and then was very fortunate to have the opportunity to become the leader of Poland capital I said you know people who are joining our firm they're technically competent high on the IQ Spectrum let's work on EQ from a talent and development perspective so some of the things that that we do are not unlike what we heard in the previous session uh we'll have each person take a personality test and they'll come out with a nine different personality types and then you can learn more about your own personality type learn about others personality type and then how you should best communicate with those personality types and where it really comes into play is around feedback because feedback one is very diff difficult to give to another human being two if you're the human being how do you receive that feedback and then what do you do with that feedback and then how do you react when you receive it because if you're a poor receiver of feedback you're likely not to get much of it because the person is hard to give the feedback if you're a bad receiver of it they're not going to give you much more so we work to train our our people and practice on these techniques uh there's a book called radical cander which we've had speakers come in and trainers come in to train us on how best to give feedback and how best uh to receive feedback in addition to that we work uh in particular this year we've actually had a series around teamwork and different elements of teamwork so first of all like how how what does it mean to be a great teammate how do you treat your other people on your team okay then what does it mean to be on a great team itself how do you operate effectively as a teammate on a team to achieve what the team's trying to accomplish and then with any organization there's teams all around the organization so how do each team interact with other teams and to achieve an objective or an outcome for a client the community or the firm itself so if you put training in place and you have intention around that training good things happen with your people and you also tend to have people who stick with you for a very long time excellent thank you very much time for that elaborate answer let's move to The Regulators Dr Ahmed as the executive director of the higher education sector at ADC I'd like to know how you collaborate with higher education institutes to implement Innovative learning approaches and priorities for the 21st century skills thank you thank you s so I think uh as a regulator we we play two roles right so we're a regulator SL partner I'll talk about the regulator part first and then the partner because they they we we work with uh industry in two different ways to achieve two different things uh as a regulator obviously any new institution or even an existing institution that wants to open up a a new program uh within the emirat of ababi or even U make substantive changes to an existing program they'll have to come to us first and we have I won't bore you with the details but there's a list of standards that they have to achieve to be able to either introduce a new program uh or make substantive changes to an existing program a key thing about that those standards is how that program whether new or modified aligns with the industry needs that is a key thing and the first thing we'd ask of any higher education institution entering the market or introducing new programs is have you done a feasibility analysis stakehold analysis where you know the type of graduate that you'll be putting out in the market where will they end up and if they don't have enough data to support that obviously we tell them go back to the drawing board and come back to us that's the regulator aspect now the partner aspect which is within any regulator you set minimum and and maximum for any standards right and you tell the operators you can work within this uh uh range uh so now the partner hat if I want to move one of the institutions to be closer to one end or the other within that range I can't do it as a regulator I'll do it as a partner to create win-win situations with institutions so that they see value in well maybe we should be on the higher end of this kpi or on the lower end of that kpi I'll give two specific examples here so for example when uh we helped launch the Indian Institute of Technology a highend probably the premier uh stem University uh uh in India they just launched a campus here in abui and we were involved with with that uh adok at the time uh um year of sustainability a lot of focus on energy transition they were looking for very very specific programs we brought adnoc we brought IIT and we co-created they co-created a program which is very specific to energy transition and sustainability and the outcome is now we have something like 12 sponsored students from ADN in that uh program these are not fresh graduates these are people who were in the industry immerse and have a minimum of five years of experience now being uh freed up from their roles to be upskilled uh and and hopefully then go back use that knowledge in their program another partnership model I'll I'll um uh uh mentioned just to give you the kind of Partnerships we have uh many of you in the audience are probably parents and what's going to happen in a week's time holidays of school so we realize that there's a gap um where students during the up students in schools have a 3-week holiday and there's so much to learn out there so we went to higher education institutions and told them okay can we work together we know AI is a big deal now so we've partnered with six higher education institutions which will be offering AI related boot camps during the summer for any high school student within the Emirate of ababi the announcement went out yesterday if you're interested just go to the adct Social and apply these are different ways where we're telling the uh institutions universities there's a need and you might actually benefit from addressing that need excellent thank you very much Dr Ahmed that's very encouraging um so may I kept you waiting um so I think this links really nicely to uh what HCT does so you play a key role across the country really in shaping educational programs for preparent students for the workforce so how do you ensure that the curriculum and academic and vocation offerings at HCT align with the evolving needs of the job market uh thank you Usama for that question uh and uh maybe to add to Dr Ahmed on what we are doing here in HCT uh and takes you back couple of years ago when we started our transformation into applied education model across HCT and we had a look uh Clos look and examination of our current programs of our current educational approach from very holistic view so there has been different aspects that we looked at first there is the need to make sure that we have Diversified uh educational Pathways that includes Bachelor degrees that could lad into jobs to high skilled job uh uh Bachelor degrees for graduates that could land them a jobs with high skills requirements there is the diploma that will link them to a medium skills jobs so that was the first transformation that has happened the area or the challenge was how to bridge the students from the high school journey to a higher education uh journey and then put them back or integrate them to the workforce the second thing we did we we did a complete review of our programs we looked at the market needs and the private sector in the UAE and the main source was from the ministry of Human Resources where we looked at the market needs what are the job occupations targeted on the whole National level as well as at each emirat level so we are distributed across the whole country and addition to that the future Trends what are the new skills that is required so that all helped us into shaping our new programs some programs were faced out some program were introduced for example we introduced 12 new diplomas last year and we stopped uh The Bachelor for Applied media and then reintroduced it this this Academic Year to be a bachelor of digital marketing as well as the Bachelor of the media production this is a one pillar of our uh or a second pillar of our transformation the third pillar was to full adapt fully the Competency Based education model we needed to make sure that competencies are embedded within our curriculum whether our needed what are the skills required in the job market so we looked at those job uh job occupation profiles what are the skills and then embedded within our curriculum and the target main target is to ensure we have High graduate employment rate on the L run based on the best practices and Benchmark that was done with the international applied education to reach 90 uh% for the last uh uh Academic Year graduates we reached 66 years 66% uh as of today and the previous cohort we reached to 85% so we are very much forward into achieving our Target great so I'm I'm just going to stick with you for for a bit now uh with regards to specifically how you integrate feedback from employers uh to ensure that it aligns the curriculum for you yes so part of our transformation also is to support the mization naice initiative so we mainly focus on the private sector so we embedded our collaboration method and our collaboration and integration with the private sector within the whole ecosystem or cycle that starts with the identification and then it starts with the codesign of our curriculum with the partners either on strategic level if they have specific needs specific programs that they would like to have it within HCT or within through the industry advisory Council so for each program we have that Council uh where it has representatives from different uh parties from different stakeholders and they give feedback on the any programs that we are reviewing they review the outcome at the end of each semester and to continuously enhance uh the programs the third one is the Cod delivery so the Cod delivery it takes different uh uh items first we introduced the appren model and last year we were in the pilot pH with the ministry of human resources and Ministry of Education where H C was the biggest contributor to that pilot pH we have more than 6,000 students joined the apprentiship program uh and that give give our student a chance to immerse within a real work life experience and also to get the feedback from our industry the second second part is to ensure that we attract industry uh a faculty from industrial background not only a pure academic no we want to make sure that they have hands-on experience they have an understanding of the of the of the context of the of the workplaces and so on the third part also is that now the we are launching the uh sabatical program for our faculty where they can go every year for a month 3 to four weeks and join a company any company either nationally or internationally to gain that experience excellent so that help us to shape better shape our programs and better shape our offerings for our student we want to make sure that the the student experience that have they have is very much mimicking the actual work exper excellent thank you very much uh sua in fact this leads me nicely to um Dr Ahmed from an From adex perspective if you can just comment briefly on the apprenticeships and internships and their role in bridging this this divide between employment and um education yeah first of all I'd like to commend atct for what they were doing with the with apprenticeship so I mean if we take a step back and look at at kind of the learning methodologies work integrated learning and exper experiential learning is is a big deal it's it's the only way for the future um having walls or or separators between industry and higher education institutions is not useful right uh we want to immerse students in real life situations and that can only be done uh through working integrated learning and experiential learning now that can take so many different formats right that could be apprenticeship and that was one extreme but that could be through mentoring that could be through Capstone projects that could be through field trips there's so many different ways where we blur the line of bringing education to Industry and bringing industry to the classroom right and I think that's that should be a two-way street it's not just uh disrupting Ed how education is being handled but also how industry is reacting and how they're contributing to uh universities um my colleague here mentioned a few examples from at but there are so many different examples happening across the board in in universities within uh uh abuli I'll mention one thing that we did recently where we had a forum uh higher education Forum with representation from every single University within the emirat and we brought in experts and and one such s session that was so well received was from for example from the University of waterl where uh uh there they have a co-op program where it's like one semester in in the University and the following semester in the uh industry and so on till they graduate so by the time a typical student graduates they have six internships under their belt and they have one of the highest uh employment rates upon graduation in anywhere in North America so there are plenty of models we just need to find what works best for us and for our programs and for the local ecosystem excellent thank you very much Dr Ahmed um with regards to the S the same area but probably more into the business side Stan how do you see the role of cross disciplinary skills shaping the workforce today yes and I'll be mindful of time here the uh you know the one of the mega Trends that's out there is actually the pace of change and the pace of disruption so the Accenture Global disruption index has increased by 200% over the last 5 years so change is going to be a constant in our lives so how do you remain agile and versatile we say at polling Capital if you're not agile you're actually fragile uh that's absolutely true so when you think about that you have to have your te technical level of confidence but then you lay your own top of that base emotional intelligence plus artificial intelligence I believe equals transformational intelligence and that's what you're going to need to be able to handle the transformation that's coming to the industry in the world fantastic thank you very much s that brings us to our last question conscious of time as well um back to you Dana and what I would really like you to do just to highlight some of the Partnerships that you've made with education institutions and the likes for this particular topic to bridge that Gap thanks Asama I'll save the best to last um three quick examples for you I sit in rooms like this all around the world we work with the Hong Kong monetary Authority they are putting people through sustainability programs because it's a priority they fund those programs that is top priority for for them and we work with them to do thatc we work with the World Bank to put people through our programs CFA program in particular in Rwanda who's looking to develop and build capacity in their financial services industry and most important today we have a fantastic partnership with adgm Academy we are launching a platform where members of the global globally minded and locally present adgm Academy Community can have access to the CFA Institute learning through a partnership that we've launched we hear a round of applause for that excellent and there's one more piece we have scholarships available for CFA program through this program and this portal so thank you excellent thank you very much Danner um in fact there will be a QR code ready for you to um scan and express your interest in those CFA scholarships with that um I'd like to thank my dear panelists for uh sharing their insight and expertise danad Dr Ahmed Shahi Stan MOS and Su hos it is evident that Bridging the Gap between Market needs and the workforce skills requires the collaboration of all of these industries together and as we move forward this open dialogue has to continue for us to ensure that the workforce is ready for future thank you very much