Skilling Latin America's Workforce and Boosting Employment Opportunities: A Call to Action
Skilling Latin America's Workforce and Boosting Employment Opportunities: A Call to Action
Experts from the public and private sector joined a roundtable to discuss the need to close the growing skills gap in Latin America in an increasingly digitalized world.
Speakers:
- Heather Conklin, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Trailhead, Salesforce
- Reina Mejía, Executive Vice President, Inter-American Development Bank
- Susan Segal, President and CEO, Americas Society/Council of the Americas
- Nicolás Kaplun, Chief Business Officer and General Manager for LATAM, Globant (moderator)
In an invitation-only event as part of AS/COA's Tech Series, representatives from companies, governments, and multilateral organizations participated in a private roundtable focused on skilling the Latin American workforce to boost economic opportunity. As businesses become more digital and automated, the participants discussed how Latin America—a region of 30 million unemployed people—needs to focus on skilling its workforce and closing the growing skills gap, especially as thousands of technology jobs go unfilled every year.
Salesforce’s Heather Conklin stressed that traditional education is not enough to teach digital skills and that governments, companies, and other stakeholders must partner to create a centralized marketplace for training. The IDB’s Reina Mejía agreed on the need to create multi-stakeholder partnerships and added that women are more vulnerable than men in the workforce due to an uneven skills deficit by gender.
