Online certified skills will have a profound effect on global talent pools within the next few years, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton told a 36-company strong consortium last month. 

“The development of certification in education via the web will become incredibly important,” she told the fourth Future of Work (FoW) Research Consortium. And she predicted the “tipping point”, when this trend would really come to the fore, “would be in five years’ time”.

She told the representatives from the global companies at the London event that this was one of a number of trends that had been accelerating over the previous consortia and had “suddenly become apparent this year”.

With increased connectivity from technology, due to prices for consumer items such as mobile phones and computers becoming more affordable for those in developing countries, Gratton said the next generation of talent would be educating and upskilling themselves through increased access to the internet. “There will be more investing in learning,” she said, “so we need to change the way we think about talent.”

The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations are the new powerhouses, she told the audience, and said China would be “as large a talent pool as Europe and the US by 2020”.

The consortium, which includes companies such as Barclays, Diageo, KPMG, ManpowerGroup, Pepsico, PwC, Shell, Tata Consultancy and Unilever, looks at how businesses need to evolve to face future global challenges by bridging the gap between academia and business practice.

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