International Swiss Talent Forum
For young people between 18- 23 years – Participation on invitation only!
Find novel and thought-provoking ideas around “building a resilient society”. It’s a chance for you to contribute to shaping the future of your generation. Develop new ideas with your group of international participants in our for you free event. Be part of the next International Swiss Talent Forum in February 2023 and join five exciting days with students from all over the world.
Five exciting days in a lavish camp – it’s your turn to find globally relevant solutions.
“The ISTF experience has been nothing short of amazing. The programme has well achieved a fine balance between the provision of information and the opportunity for creativity. It has been an intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling experience.”
Cassandra, Singapore
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International Swiss Talent Forum 2024
Learning for the Future
Learning for the Future
Can we ensure that what one learns today is still useful and relevant tomorrow?
What skills will be needed in the workplace of the future? Which new opportunities for learning does technology offer at the individual and organisational levels? These are just a few questions raised within this edition’s topic.
Nobody would argue that a vast majority of society should master basic skills like reading and performing mathematical operations. However, the required skillset keeps growing, e.g., through the advent of new information and communication technologies, digital literacy has become an additional fundamental skill to navigate our new normal information-soaked society.
The paradigm is also shifting to life-long learning: for many, the career path has twists and turns – and oftentimes wanders far away from what was part of one’s training be it vocational or in school. At the International Swiss Talent Forum 2024, we want to find out what Learning for the Future looks like through the lenses of various challenges to try and develop ideas to bring society forward.
Interested to learn more about the eligibility criteria and the registration for the event? Then check out the Flyer:
Topic Leader 2023
Challengers 2024
Challenge 1
Designing the Classroom of Tomorrow
The way people learn, and the skills required to address today’s challenges, are changing. To adjust to these novel requirements and approaches, we need to redesign the classroom in a way that acknowledges the fast-paced transformation of our world, the multiple sources of knowledge (both in formal settings and informal settings such as social media), and the forever evolving technological capabilities.
Dr. Julia Chatain leads the group EduTech at ETH Zurich. Her group gathers expertise on designing, implementing, and evaluating cutting-edge educational technology for higher education using a co-design methodology. Previously, during her doctorate, Julia explored how embodied interaction can make mathematics more graspable. Julia holds an engineering degree from École Polytechnique (Paris, France), as well as Master of Science from EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). Julia also worked as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher at Inria (Bordeaux, France), and as a Software Engineer at ETH (Zurich, Switzerland). Throughout her career, Julia organized and coached in several workshops related to STEM gender diversity such as Django Girls, Girls Code Too, or Girls Go MINT.
Challenge 2
Rethinking Online Career Orientation
For young people the decision of what to do after compulsory schooling and which career pathway to take can be a difficult decision. Research shows that career decisions are often dependent on one’s social background and parents’ ideas and aspirations for their children. The challenge addresses the need for impartial, informative and comprehensive information about occupations and career pathways. It requests a critical analysis of existing off- and online provisions and a conceptualization of a good online tool for career orientation.
Prof. Dr. Antje Barabasch is head of the research area “Teaching and Learning within the VPET system” (vocational and professional education and training) at the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training. Her research focuses on innovative learning cultures in Swiss enterprises, the support of creativity in VET, VET policy transfer and international studies as well as supporting informal learning in enterprises. Prior to working in Switzerland, she served as expert for VET at Cedefop, an agency of the European Commission in Greece. Antje also taught and conducted research at various universities in Germany, US, Canada and New Zealand over the past 20 years.
Challenge 3
Building Capabilities to Enable Companies for the Future
There are many predictions that in a few years workers‘ core skills will be disrupted by technology. We need to be able to up- and re-skill our employees and provide them with meaningful growth experiences in time to stay innovative and meet business needs.
Concretely, how can a global multinational company like Roche recognise which skills need to be built and which ones will lose relevance, manage training that serves the learning needs across several / different generations of employees and take advantage of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, all the while being efficient.
Prashant Atravanam has been working at Roche in various roles globally in Commercial, Leadership, Learning & Development as well as Talent innovation for over 19 years. Overall he has 25 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical industry. A microbiologist by training , he also has an MBA and is a Leadership coach as well as Certified Professional Training Manager. He is affiliated with the ICF Indian chapter as well as other training organizations.
Prashant brings a lot of diverse experiences in emerging economies as he grew up in India being exposed to diverse cultures and languages. He can speak 6 languages and that has helped him connect with and understand cross cultural work forces and the challenges faced while developing talent.
Challenge 4
Shaping the Copyright Framework for Future Education
Intellectual Property Law is a balancing act between the rights of creators or owners of inventions and public interests. Both learners and new learning technologies depend on being able to use protected works, such as texts, images and videos. Copyright law creates limitations but also opens up possibilities. The question is how the legal framework can be modelled to meet the challenges of „Learning in the Future“.
Sabrina Konrad studied law in Bern, specialising in commercial law. After stays abroad in Paris and New York, she was admitted to the bar in 2012 and subsequently worked as a court clerk. She took up her position at the IPI in the area of copyright law in autumn 2013. As Deputy Head of the Copyright Legal Services, Ms Konrad regularly gives lectures and con-ducts various workshops on copyright law topics. In her spare time, she is a passionate paint-er.
Franziska Raaflaub studied law in Fribourg and completed a bilingual programme. She has been working for the IPI since July 2023 and is currently finishing her PhD. Alongside her studies, she previously worked as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Fri-bourg. In her spare time, Ms Raaflaub is an enthusiastic musician.
Challenge 5
Unlocking OpenAI and Human architecture for Equity, Equality & Ethics
This challenge is to forensically explore systematic bias and flaws in OpenAI e.g.: gender, age, neurodiversity, disability and race, and identify solutions for its use in school.
- The known data set bias that Artificial Intelligence (AI) learns from
- The data, understanding and actions of AI of when it does not know.
- What humans and AI architecture can do to support equitable, equal and ethical inputs (e.g., data, prompts, training) and outputs?
Learning for the future will include AI for students, but due to a flawed human world and bias AI will also need to learn.
Chantelle leads as a Board Advisor, Thought Leader, Business Director and ORSC coach on the Future of Work with 20 + years of experience globally. She gained cross-industry experience in digital technologies, AI, product development, go-to-market, organisation design and restructuring, operating model, talent, and learning. She does research in Human Augmentation and Open AI and amplifies others' impact in her board roles. She embodies living a life creating memories, where she travelled the world with her family. In COVID, she learnt how to increase a sustainable life from her own garden to the table. She lives a life of balance and thriving as a virtual native with her hubby and two kids based in Switzerland but with three citizenships (seeing herself as a global citizen).
Project Leader
Main partners
Fonds Verena-Guggisberg