The Delhi Declaration has laid promising grounds to strengthen the digital economy of G20 members. One of the outstanding achievements of the Indian Presidency is to arrive at an undivided agreement of a roadmap to “prepare for the future of work”.[i] For the uninitiated, the G20 Declaration is not an international pact or treaty, where signatories are legally bound to take necessary steps like making changes to domestic laws, for example, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property rights. In an arrangement like the G20 Declaration, signatories are expected to act on a good effort basis to implement the agreement/declaration instead.
However, the absence of a legal binding effect does not reduce the G20 Delhi Declaration to a trivial achievement. While trade-offs were made like, some original proposals/ideas were either diluted or dropped to ensure consensus, the Indian Presidency performed a remarkable role in arriving at a consensus, given the current global geopolitics. After months of hard negotiations, through multilateral and bilateral meetings (held in different cities of India – Lucknow, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bangalore), and innumerable rounds of editing, the Declaration on “preparing for the future of work” was shaped up. This piece tries to read the fine print of the Declaration and shed some light on the hits and the misses.
Why is the Delhi Declaration important?
First, never in the history of mankind, technologies have posed such humungous challenges for the labour market. To appreciate why we need to prepare, some statistics might help. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2020), based on survey data of about 15 industries across 26 countries states that “by 2025, 85 million jobs may be lost due to machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge.” But new jobs would be adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines, and algorithms. To stay relevant in the labour market, one must gain new skills or upgrade skills. Our age-old assumption of linear careers based on a model of ‘learn, work, retire’ is at risk. Unless countries do not prepare well in advance, economies like India, where human labour is abundant, loss of jobs could lead to serious socio-economic problems. The Delhi Declaration offers an indicative strategy to skill, upskill (acquiring additional skills/upgrading), and reskill (acquiring new skills) labour force to prepare for the future of work.
Secondly, the fourth industrial revolution will come through digital technologies. However, skill gaps are acting as a barrier to the adoption of emerging technologies. This eventually would cause a huge loss to both industry and the nation. For instance, this latest study shows digital skilling gaps in the African Union (now a member of G20). The Delhi Declaration helps in prioritising digital skills as an essential step to ensure developing countries are not left out due to the talent gap.
Thirdly, at present, different countries follow different approaches to digital education, skilling, and certification. The lack of a harmonised framework or common taxonomy creates barriers for both employees and employers in the labour market to identify relevant jobs and talent respectively. The Declaration seeks to develop a shared understanding/common language of the different skills needed in the digital era across academia, industry, and government that can drive talent transformation at a large scale. Thus, it can allow for nations that lack digital skills and, more generally, the skills for the digital era to conveniently tap into a shared global human talent pool.
What have we achieved?
The following are the main outcomes of the Declaration which could serve as a roadmap for G20 members to prepare for the future of work:
G20 Toolkit for designing digital skilling, upskilling, and reskilling programs
Under the Indian Presidency, a useful toolkit has been designed which is a compendium of rich experiences (like, successful case studies) provided by G20 members and guest countries on aspects including skill qualification frameworks, occupational standards, programmes, strategies, and schemes for digital skilling. The toolkit lists an indicative strategy on how to implement skilling, upskilling and reskilling programs, through the following specific steps:
- How to identify key emerging technologies to build a future-ready workforce?
- How to make the workforce gender-neutral?
- How to link school/higher education curricula with market needs?
- How to classify job tasks and map them to required digital skills as per the demand?
- How to assess gaps in existing skilling programs?
- How to train the trainers like investment on training capacity?
- How to ensure digital credentials are genuine and can be verified?
For any interested G20 member or any nation in the world, the toolkit will serve as a useful reference document to learn and adopt experiences and strategies and then tailor them as per their domestic context and requirements.
Cross country comparison of digital skills
G20 members have agreed to carry out a ‘cross country comparison of digital skills’ which would entail identification, definition and comparison of digital skills and competencies across borders. It seeks to establish a common understanding between taxonomies related to the skills needed for the digital era, to contribute to greater employment, innovation, and economic development. At present, each country is governed by their respective national skills qualification framework which defines a job role and assigns a certain level of competency for each job role, like, data scientist, quality manager or solution architect.
The lack of a common framework and understanding between countries is problematic for both employees and employers. For example, a solution architect or data scientist in Britain operating at Level 7 (usually levels are assigned by domestic skills qualification framework) need not match Level 7 as per the Canadian qualification framework for a similar job role. As a result, an IT company based in Britian may face difficulties to map its job role with competencies available in Canada due to diversity of syllabus, proficiencies and certifications. As a result, the current process becomes cumbersome and ineffective in creating a global seamless talent pool. To overcome this challenge, the Declaration encourages members to engage in bilateral or multilateral dialogues to create a common understanding of the digital skills needed in different job roles, tasks, qualifications, and credentials or professional certifications.
What have we missed?
Creation of Common Reference Framework for harmonised standards
While cross country comparison is a good starting point, to ensure a global pool of digital skills, a common reference framework (CRF) based on detailed mapping of qualification, competency and certification standards must be designed. This would lead to mutual recognition of digital skills based on the lowest common multiple and create interoperable standards through a participative process. CRF could enable talent mobilisation, which makes it easier for companies globally to hire valuable skills that are critical for their adoption of digital tools and technologies.
The aim of CRF is not to thrust a framework on a member country or remove diversity of education, competency, and certification. It would only serve as a point of useful reference, which members may voluntarily in their sovereign rights choose to utilise, to undertake the exercise of detailed mapping of digital skills and harmonisation of standards.
However, the members expressed reservations in buying the idea of a global CRF. Consequently, efforts were diverted to arrive at a diluted idea of cross-country comparison to avoid any inconvenient log jam. Also, we lost the opportunity under the current Presidency to create a clear roadmap on how the cross-country comparison would be carried out. Further, it is not clear whether this comparison would translate into a common taxonomy to address the problem of labour market.
In best case scenario, using the foundation of CRF, members countries could work on the concept of skills passport (e-document to recognise the skills one has achieved in school, at work and through life experiences) to facilitate cross-border mobility of workforce. However, given labour mobility could be a sensitive issue, especially given the current geopolitics, it was consciously kept out of discussions.
Establishing a Centre of Excellence
The Indian Presidency had proposed setting up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to serve as a knowledge sharing platform — a gateway to access a repository of information on national skills frameworks, jobs, research on skill demand and supply trends, and skills taxonomies of various G20 countries. Since the proposal of setting up a CoE could not secure a position in the Declaration, it finds recognition in the annexure document i.e. G20 Digital Economy Ministers’ Meeting Outcome Document.[ii] Beyond this, no progress could be made on the design, structure, funding, and functionalities of the CoE.
Similar to the idea of CRF, to ensure consensus, CoE was pushed as a future deliverable to be built and maintained by UNESCO. Achieving an understanding among members on how to make the CoE up and running under India’s Presidency could have afforded the nation an opportunity to lead a nodal body, for collaboration between G20 countries in the mutual recognition of digital talent.
Great opportunity for Global South
India has symbolically handed over the gavel to Brazil for next year’s presidency. While Delhi Declaration has started a good work, Brazil needs to do/continue the groundwork. Given India and Brazil are emerging economies with aligned interests, it is a great opportunity for the Global South to lead the work of cross-country comparison of digital skills and setting up the CoE in collaboration with UNESCO. Once we cover the initial steps, perhaps member countries would appreciate the merits of this exercise and move towards designing a common reference framework of digital skills.
While the summit meeting is over, the Indian Presidency will continue till November 30, 2023. This window must be used effectively for communications with member countries and strategising how to operationalise the two deliverables i.e., cross country comparison of digital skills and designing the CoE.
[i] Refer para 20 of the Delhi Declaration, and Annexure 3 of Digital Economy Ministers Meeting Outcome Document & Chair’s summary.
[ii] Refer Annexure, Point 7(iv) of the Delhi Declaration & Para 23 of Digital Economy Ministers Meeting Outcome Document & Chair’s summary.
The writer is a public policy consultant. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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