World Talent Ranking

World Talent Ranking 2022

Data from the 2022 IMD World Talent Ranking (WTR) shows that Switzerland remains the leader among 63 economies in attracting and retaining talent for the sixth consecutive year. It is followed by Sweden, Iceland, Norway, then Denmark. Since 2018, Iceland has leapt from 16^th to third.

The main overall observation? Global economies are reassessing the balance they make when cultivating domestic and international talent, in a bid to compensate for skilled labor losses as a result of travel constraints and lockdowns during the pandemic.

Pre- and post-pandemic patterns with respect to brain drain have not been as damaging to the talent competitiveness of those countries that have strengthened their appeal.

An economy’s appeal to skilled labor was measured via factors including but not limited to remuneration, taxes, cost of living, and the education system, as well as the economy’s position on environmental issues and a fair judicial system.

IMD’s World Competitiveness Center takes a three-pronged approach to measuring talent in economies:

• The Investment & Development factor measures the resources earmarked to cultivate a homegrown workforce.
• The Appeal factor evaluates the extent to which an economy attracts foreign and retains local talent.
• And the Readiness factor measures the quality of the skills and competencies that are available in a country’s talent pool.

The 2022 WTR studied 63 economies by quantifying 31 criteria (a mixture of hard data and survey responses from executives) to assesses these countries’ ripeness for fostering long-term value creation for their enterprises and the economy at large, via their workforce. Each criterion was then organized into one of the three factors above.

“In the future, national education systems will become less important to determine the quality of the talent pool. This is the result of talent globalization, but also of countries borrowing successful educational policies from others and the resulting race to the top in education. Indirectly, quality of life and economic sustainability will indeed determine the quality of the talent pool as well. There will be winners and losers,” said Professor Arturo Bris, Director of the WCC.  

2022 Report

Browse the full report

IMD World Talent Ranking 2022 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