 MATT HEIMER: Deanna, you and I had a chance to talk about this privately a little bit. You've been at Guardian Life now for 12 years, you just wrapped up nine years as CEO, and you talked about seeing some of these skills gaps emerge within your own workforce. Where did those gaps appear, and what did you do as a CEO on the ground to address them? DEANNA MULLIGAN: Thanks. It's great to be here and I would just add one statistic to Liz's great statistic of 300-plus million jobs changing, and that about 85 million jobs will go unfilled by 2030 if we don't change the skills mix that we have today. And the skills that we have been working on at Guardian are, we did a big transformation about five or six years ago from data center skills to cloud skills. When we moved mostly to the cloud, we had to reskill about 500 people in new technologies, and we learned some interesting things. First of all, of course, not everyone opted to be reskilled, but many people did. And one might think that it would be the people who are younger, tenured, or less time in their career who might be more willing to switch. But we found that many people who are very long tenured made a fairly easy switch from the data center skills to the cloud skills. And one study that recently was done by Gartner Group back that up, where they did a study on digital skills and they looked at all types of people in the workforce and found that 50-year-olds who decided to make that switch were actually quite successful. And the reason why was that having a deep subject matter expertise is foundational to making the switch to new skills. And we found that as well. We found that our long tenured people with their deep subject matter expertise, if they were motivated to learn the new skills, did quite well. So I think that's a really positive finding that we should be sharing out there with companies. MATT HEIMER: What has to happen at the top to make that happen? What needs to happen? Does it need to be a change in the mindset of CEOs and C-suite level executives? How do they need to change, reskill themselves, perhaps, in order to reskill their companies? Alan, I think he's trying to weigh in on that. ALAN: Yeah, a few things on that and what Liz had said before, we are helping each organization around 400,000 people to rebound every year. And unfortunately, in the months to come there will be more of that kind of rebound. What we say is that we should invest in employability, not per se in protecting jobs. So it means that it is very important that we and employers are taking the responsibility regarding their employability and their upskilling and reskilling people, either for their own needs because they need new skills, or to make sure that these people will be able to rebound in a positive way in the labor market. And we are happy to help them. I think that's extremely important to have that kind of mindset because we see many companies today, on one hand, laying off, restructuring, and at the same time hiring new people. It's quite, I would say, strange to see that kind of press release when you see the two numbers. So many people being laid off and at the same time so many, thousands of people that will be hired. And what we say is that it is much cheaper and much more socially responsible and much more effective/productive to look at your own workforce, look at the people that you can upskill and reskill, and make that investment. Because we have also figures. When you lay off people and then you rehire somebody with new skills, it will cost you, on average, and these figures are coming from ABB, for example, to US$100,000. But if you take the commitment to reskille or upskill your own people, it will cost you between US$30,000 and US$35,000. So also financially, this is really a great investment to be done. 

85 million jobs could go unfilled by 2030

Leadership

Guardian's Deanna Mulligan on how to fill the skills gap.