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E
very region from the Americas
to Asia Pacific is facing the
same problem. This situation
is exacerbated by a truly global and
increasingly mobile workforce that still
remains lacking in the comprehensive
skill set required to be truly valuable
in today’s complex and challenging
economic landscape.
Talent, we believe, is the key to global
economic and political success.
Today’s world is characterised by an
interdependent global economy and
competition for talent on a global scale.
The rate and speed of technology and
knowledge growth is unprecedented
yet there remains a disconnect between
education and industry in how to best
develop the workforce of the future.
In fact, the effectiveness and value of
traditional higher education in doing
so is increasingly being questioned.
The growing role of alternative learning
platforms, stackable certificates, micro-
masters, and specialised learning camps
are increasingly valued and prized
for their efficacy in workforce
development and continuing staff
professional growth.
Bob Athwal
Manny Contomanolis
Trudy Steinfeld
What we see emerging in the world of
talent acquisition is a challenging set of
circumstances that mandates decisive
action on a variety of fronts to better
prepare the graduates of colleges and
universities to contribute, in the most
effective way possible, to problems
apparent in nearly every industry,
business, government, and not-for-profit
sectors across the world.
There are many different ways to
characterise the talent that is needed
for today’s complex economic and
labour force environment. Successful
Higher
education institutions
and systems must play a
bigger and more decisive
role in preparing graduates
to be successful in a rapidly
changing and truly
global world.
The global contributor:
emerging talent acquisition
and the Higher Education
mandate
The long anticipated global talent crisis has perhaps finally become manifest as the latest
ManPowerGroup annual global survey of more than 38,000 employers in 42 countries revealed that
35% of respondents reported difficulty in filling jobs with the right talent. Bob Athwal, University of
Leicester, Manny Contomanolis, Rochester Institute of Technology, US and Trudy Steinfeld, New York
University, US suggest the three competencies to describe every global worker.
18 Graduate Recruiter | www.agr.org.uk
Higher Education

contributors must be multi-talented,
highly skilled, flexible and adaptable.
One of our colleagues at a major
American accounting and consulting
firm noted that, at the heart of it, all
organisations are looking for “GSPs” –
good, smart people. It is the global nature
of the circumstances that we describe
here, however, that prompted us to focus
on the concept of the “global contributor”
as a way of describing the needed
workforce of both today and tomorrow.
Of initial concern, of course, is
determining what skills, competencies
and strengths describe the global
contributor. There has been a tremendous
amount of work in this area and based
on our analysis we have concluded that
there are three interdependent skills
categories that should describe every
worker.
The first of these is are “universal” or
“basic” competencies. These include:
communicating and collaborating;
complex, open-ended, multidisciplinary
problem solving; critical thinking and
judgment; creativity and entrepreneurial
thinking; authenticity and humility; and
innovative use of knowledge, information
and opportunities.
The second is job specific competencies.
Every job and career has specific skills
and competencies which need to be
mastered at a higher level. This is
common, for example, in the professions
such as nursing, law, engineering, and
accountancy.
The third of these, we suggest, are global
competencies. These include: knowledge
of world cultures, regions, and
international issues; the ability to model
the values and perspectives of other
cultures, people, and global realities;
communicating in languages other than
the home language; collaborating with
people from different backgrounds and
value sets; and the ability to use and
process information from different global
sources and diverse contexts.
We believe the global contributor, of
increasing value and importance across
the globe, is described by these three sets
of skills and abilities working together
and applied as appropriate to a given role,
organisation, and industry.
Identifying and articulating desired
competencies is essential in effective
talent acquisition, never more so than
today, as recruiting and hiring is
increasingly focused on skills rather than
schools and competencies rather than
curricula. The already rapid developments
in technology, neuroscience, and data
analytics will significantly enhance the
reliability and effectiveness of testing in
candidate sourcing and selection. The
more traditional forms of sourcing and
recruiting will gradually give way to new
techniques which will focus on skills and
competencies. Those skills and
competencies will also increasingly
include the global set of abilities we have
described. We have already seen a steady
increase, especially in the US and in
Europe, in the number of organisations
that are placing greater value and
emphasis on hiring the global
contributor.
Despite criticism to the contrary, perhaps
one of the most promising developments
is the renewed interest on the part of
higher education in developing global
contributors.
Interest on behalf of hiring organisations
in this kind of talent is necessary but not
sufficient. Higher education institutions
and systems must play a bigger and more
decisive role in preparing graduates to
be successful in a rapidly changing and
truly global world.
While there has always been a level of
focus on the universal and job specific
skills and competency development,
we are beginning to see a number of
developments in global competency
building among colleges and universities.
Institutions, for example, are highlighting
global skill development in career
preparation courses, workshops, and
seminars. Long presumed to be solely
the bailiwick of faculty within academic
programmes, the skill development
content offered in these training and
education programmes is increasingly
important in supplementing the
traditional education experience. This
kind of supplemental programming
also helps raise student awareness of
the global landscape and helps focus
student choices on courses of study
more reflective of their potential
interests. Higher education institutions
are also increasingly looking to partner
with global organisations creating
opportunities for student mentorship,
the development of global internship
and “work abroad” opportunities, and
the ability to better exchange trend data
working together to better understand
and respond to emerging workforce
education challenges and opportunities.
We also see growing evidence of more
focused careers conferences, job fairs,
case, and hackathon styled competitions
designed with an emphasis on global
perspectives, trends, and opportunities.
Emerging assessment strategies and data
analytic capabilities are also allowing
higher education institutions to more
effectively map desired skill development
to specific activities and experiences and,
in doing so, provide richer insights into
the relative value of those skills to career
outcomes and success in both the near-
and long-term.
In short, we believe we may have
reached the critical tipping point
where the pressing concerns in global
talent needs and development may be
creating the best environment and
circumstances for the hiring community
and higher education to bridge the gap
between work force needs and workforce
development. Our conceptualisation of
the global contributor described here
suggests a skill and competency based
framework to help contextualise those
collaboration opportunities and hopefully
contribute to the success of those efforts.
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Global universities

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