World Talent Ranking

People’s motivation for work during the pandemic has proven crucial for economic success, IMD’s World Talent Ranking 2021 finds.

Workers today are increasingly motivated by high quality of life, flexible working, and opportunities to train on the job, whereas previously, remuneration was the driving force behind their desire to stick at their jobs.

This is a major finding in 2021’s IMD World Talent Ranking, which each year measures worker motivation, quality of life, and employee training as three criteria among 31. Responses to questions on these criteria are among those gathered in a survey of executives in 64 economies across the world, and placed alongside hard data to form the bigger picture.

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 3 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 (3x33.3 ~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.