Debate | Education and Employment Mismatch: New Contribution

The Brazilian economist Claudio de Moura Castro joins our debate on Education and Employment Mismatch with the paper ‘Creating a Self-Coordinating System Is Better than Coordinating’. There, he argues against McKinsey’s proposal to create some bureaucratic machinery to coordinate employment supply and demand and rather suggests improving the mechanisms that make coordination an automatic outcome.

Authored by a McKinsey research team, the initial paper addresses the education and employment challenge. It is based on a McKinsey study, which looked at skill development in 25 different countries and investigated education-to-employment initiatives in these contexts. The authors claim that the most successful efforts are those where different stakeholders interact intensively and frequently: Employers need to get involved in education, and educators should play a bigger role in employment in order to provide for a smooth transition from education to employment.

Apart from de Moura Castro’s reaction, the paper is followed by critical comments by Beatriz Cardoso, Executive Director of Laboratório de Educação, Brazil, and Shailaja Fennell lecturer at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.

Initial contribution:
Mona Mourshed, Tom Isherwood, Ali Jaffer & Cheryl Lim, McKinsey
Road Work: Creating a Better Highway from Education to Employment

Reaction and analysis:
Beatriz Cardoso, Executive Director of Laboratório de Educação, Brazil
Investing in Early Learning: A Long-Term Pathway from Education to Employment

Shailaja Fennell, lecturer at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, UK
Gaps in Human Capital: The Challenges of Completing the Educational Cycle and Securing Employment

Claudio de Moura Castro, former Professor of Economics and World Bank Senior Economist
Creating a Self-Coordinating System Is Better than Coordinating

Download the whole debate (pdf)

We invite the initial authors and any interested readers to share their comments and view.