World Talent Ranking

World Talent Ranking 2023

Executives perceive remote working as hampering career development, but that’s at odds with retaining talent, WCC ranking finds

For the 10th year running, Switzerland has topped a 64-strong list of economies spread over eight regions, in the IMD World Talent Ranking.

The Alpine nation’s quality of life, statutory minimum wage and primary and secondary education systems were unbeatable. Luxembourg was second, and Iceland third.

A major finding in the ranking was that remote and hybrid work is affecting career progression in the eyes of many: 27% of the 4,000 executives surveyed in a survey that fed into the results said they felt that remote work was detrimental to career development in their company.

However, those economies in which remote work is considered less harmful for career development are, on average, also those that prioritize the attraction and retention of highly skilled professionals as well as in the levels of female participation in the job market: two important components of talent competitiveness.

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2023 Report

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IMD World Talent Ranking 2023 Download the full report (PDF, 2.9 MB)

Methodology in a nutshell

1. The IMD World Talent Ranking (WTR) assesses the status and the development of competencies necessary for enterprises and the economy to achieve long term value creation. It does so by using a set of indicators which measure the development, retention and attraction of a domestic and international highly-skilled workforce.
2. Based on our research, the methodology of the World Talent Ranking defines Talent Competitiveness into three main factors:
   -Investment and Development
   -Appeal
   -Readiness
3. These three factors comprise 31 criteria, although each factor does not necessarily have the same number of criteria (for example, it takes more criteria to assess Readiness than to evaluate Investment and Development).
4. Each factor, independently of the number of criteria it contains, has the same weight in the overall consolidation of results that is 1/3 (3×33.3 ~100).
5. Criteria can be hard data, which analyze talent development as it can be measured (e.g. Total Public Expenditure on Education) or soft data, which analyze the quality of these investments as they can be perceived (e.g. Management Education).
6. Finally, to compute the overall World Talent Ranking, we aggregate the criteria to calculate the scores of each factor which function as the basis to generate the overall ranking.

Computing the Rankings