Welcome to the 2020 Post-Global Talent Summit report. This year’s “Back to School” edition of the summit was held on September 9-10, 2020 just as nations worldwide were grappling with how they could return to learning safely after massive closures kept almost a billion students out of school in early March.
This year’s summit was held completely virtually, in partnership with the Minerva Project, on Minerva’s unique learning and convening platform Forum.
I want to thank Ben Nelson, the CEO and Founder of Minerva, for his partnership and vision, and the entire Minerva team, faculty, and students who have contributed countless hours to producing our event this year.
I also want to thank our speakers, moderators, our Summit MC Kelly Bailey, and our partners, including: Diplomatic Courier, Emsi, WISE, Salzburg Global Seminar, Karanga, Zurich International School, Gallup, Science at Home, the John Templeton Foundation, and Learning Economy Foundation.
Eight years ago, GTS set out to answer a couple of seemingly simple questions: How do we prepare for the disruption that rising automation will bring? How do we equip everyone with the lifelong skills and competencies needed for a 21st century economy?
Earlier this Spring, I was invited to participate at Minerva’s commencement and summit, Consequent. It didn’t take long to realize that Minerva students are unlike other students. I left Consequent inspired that this generation of life-long learners is truly going to be robot-proof. And this is why I was delighted to have some of them with us at GTS as speakers and as contributors to this post-summit report.
Our teams produced four mini-summits across all time zones, looking at all the important issues currently on the minds of policymakers, employers, educators, students, and parents: how will we weather the COVID-19 crisis together? And how are we going to build a resilient, future-proof education-to-work pipeline after the pandemic? This report, expertly captured by our senior editor Winona Roylance, highlights the key ideas and presentations from the summit sessions. We are also thrilled to feature guest contributors as well as three essays from our own Education Correspondent Allyson Berri.
As always, we welcome your views and questions at editors at diplomaticourier dot org and look forward to seeing you at next year’s summit in person.
