INSEAD, which has a major campus in Singapore, just ranked the city first in the world in talent competitiveness
Singapore has claimed the top spot in the 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index, overtaking long-time leader Switzerland and underscoring the city-state’s rise as one of the world’s strongest talent hubs.
The new report – produced by INSEAD in partnership with the Washington, D.C.-based Portulans Institute – ranks 135 economies on their ability to enable, attract, grow, and retain talent while developing both vocational and adaptive skills. The GTCI evaluates national talent ecosystems through indicators spanning education quality, workforce skills, institutional strength, innovation capacity, and the adaptability of human capital in the face of technological and economic change.
Switzerland had held the No. 1 position in every edition of the GTCI since its launch in 2013 – ten consecutive reports from 2013 through 2023. Singapore, however, had been steadily closing the gap: it ranked No. 2 in the previous GTCI (2023) after ranking third five years ago in the 2020 report.
‘A LEADING GLOBAL INDICATOR FOR HUMAN CAPITAL’
Switzerland falls to second this year, followed by Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, the United States, and Australia to round out the top 10. (See the complete 135-country ranking on page 2.) Most of the top economies are high-income countries with mature education systems, stable institutions, and strong innovation performance.
The GTCI 2025 report is authored by Felipe Monteiro, academic director of the Global Talent Competitiveness Index, INSEAD; Paul Evans, emeritus professor of organizational behavior and the Shell Chair of Human Resources and Organizational Development, emeritus, INSEAD; Rafael Escalona Reynoso, director and CEO of the Portulans Institute; Shailja Bang, head of research for Portulans; and Elizabeth H. Redmond, Portulans project manager and research assistant.
The 2025 edition also includes a wide-ranging foreword from Lily Fang, INSEAD’s dean of research and innovation and UBS Chaired Professor in Investment Banking. “With this 11th edition, GTCI has both come of age and started a new chapter,” Fang writes, noting that the index has become “a leading global indicator for human capital.”
Fang points to the timeliness of this year’s theme – resilience and transformation – in what she describes as “a period of maximum disruption and anxiety.” Earlier GTCI editions, she says, proved prescient in anticipating the effects of AI on the workforce. “Society,” she writes, “needs to find the resilience to bounce forward rather than simply bounce back after disruptive shocks.”
See INSEAD’s 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index here and the 135-country ranking on the next page.
AND DON’T MISS RANKING THE COUNTRIES THAT ARE BEST IN THE WORLD AT ATTRACTING — AND KEEPING — TALENT
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