"So, where do you see yourself in 10 years?” by Youth Ambassador – Youth Voices: Claudia Llerena (EN)
Youth Voices is an initiative that brings young perspectives into the heart of the Women’s Forum as part of the conversation itself. It creates space for young voices to engage critically with the Forum’s debates, translating global discussions on gender equality into situated reflections, shaped by lived experience.
For the 2025 edition, the Forum placed young people at the centre of the dialogue, inviting them to reflect on the panels they attended and the ideas that challenged, unsettled or reframed their understanding. These contributions do not seek to summarise the conversations, but to extend them, questioning how global narratives resonate across different contexts, trajectories and systems.
This article, written by Claudia Llerena, a young Peruvian professional and Youth Ambassador of the Women’s Forum, emerges from an observation of the contemporary world of work: professional trajectories are changing, though not always at the same pace as the criteria by which they are evaluated. Drawing on the debates of the Global Meeting, as well as her academic and applied experience across Latin America and Europe, the text explores how this mismatch shapes what is expected of a career and the real possibilities of progression and long-term projection.
*Panel of reference:
Aligned ambitions – Economic success rooted in fairness and equity
In a world marked by uncertainty and shifting pressures, fairness and equity have emerged as powerful engines of innovation and resilience. Progress made cannot be taken for granted. This conversation challenges leaders to stay focused and courageous, to double down on inclusive growth, because in today's economy, scaling back on equity is not only a moral failure, it’s a strategic risk.
Moderated by: Charlotte Kan, international MC and presenter
Celia Thellier, Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer – Choose My Company
Helen Brown, Chief People Officer – Stack Infrastructure
Leslie Dehant, Chief Human Resources – KPMG France
Maria Lorente, Chief People Officer – Bureau Veritas Group
-----
Careers no longer move in straight lines.
They rarely unfold through linear advancement or vertical ascent. Instead, increasingly, they are shaped by subtler yet decisive criteria: internal coherence, recognition, and a sense of purpose.
As talent recalibrates the criteria used to evaluate organisations and professional trajectories, the market responds. Yet this transformation does not necessarily broaden access to opportunity; on the contrary, it reveals how many profiles remain excluded even from the very frameworks in which purpose and choice can be articulated as genuine options.
This shift matters because it alters not only how careers are pursued, but how legitimacy itself is constructed within contemporary labour systems, now grounded in coherence between declared values, internal practices and outcomes.
These changes are reflected in how young people navigate and narrate their professional experiences. Those entering the professional world increasingly approach organisations as complex systems, assessing ethical standards, long-term vision and, above all, the correspondence between discourse and practice. The emphasis falls on the criteria through which talent confers legitimacy, rather than on the range of opportunities offered by the market.
Celia Thellier opened the session by inviting us to return to our twenties, a stage at which building a career was assumed, almost by default, to be the natural next step. That assumption has weakened. Data presented by Choose My Company show that 73% of university students and 81% of young professionals report satisfaction with their current experience. Campuses and offices function, for now, as spaces of relative stability within an environment widely perceived as uncertain.
This apparent stability conceals a deeper misalignment between evolving expectations and the institutional arrangements that govern access and progression. As those entering the labour market increasingly incorporate personal sustainability and coherence as decision-making filters, many organisations continue to assess potential through frameworks of immediate performance. Expectations evolve quickly; organisational structures respond more slowly. Within that gap, young talent becomes more discerning, capable of distinguishing between coherence and rhetoric.
In this context, organisational culture is being redefined. It takes shape through everyday decisions and practices that determine how individuals grow and progress within an organisation. Throughout the panel, its relevance was framed as a matter of operational capacity: the ability to design environments that sustain development, foster learning and enable long-term professional projection.
The interventions of Helen Brown, Leslie Dehant and Maria Lorente translated this perspective into operational terms. If the relationship between talent and organisations is being renegotiated, it cannot be resolved through discursive adjustments alone; it requires changes in how entry points are structured, performance is assessed and decisions are authorised.
Helen Brown, from Stack Infrastructure, illustrated this through the Stack Academy in Italy. By shifting to a skills-based selection model, the programme attracted over 2,000 applications for 13 places and achieved a 38% female intake in a highly male-dominated field. This shift made visible capabilities that had previously been filtered out at early recruitment stages.
From KPMG France, Leslie Dehant brought the discussion into the realm of indicators. Female representation in leadership positions, mandatory equality indices, promotion rates and access to high-potential programmes, what once functioned as reputation, now sits firmly within the performance equation. Diverse teams retain talent, innovate more consistently and enhance customer satisfaction.
Maria Lorente described the transformation of Bureau Veritas over the past decade. The transition from a homogeneous executive committee to a more diverse leadership redefined the organisation’s identity, moving it from a French company with global reach to a genuinely international institution. Without a plurality of perspectives, she cautioned, organisations lose their capacity to interpret realities that extend beyond their own institutional and cultural frames.
The decisions that enable such shifts are neither neutral nor self-evident. They require leadership and the courage to intervene in procedures embedded in organisational practice. In her first role in human resources management, Lorente chose to redesign the internal selection process and introduce blind recruitment. Within six months, the proportion of women in leadership positions rose from 9% to 24%. The talent did not change. The decision to look differently did.
Seen from this perspective, these organisational decisions speak to how talent is made visible, evaluated, and recognised across labour systems, a logic that acquires even greater intensity at the territorial level.
I write from Peru, a context in which professional trajectories unfold within institutional frameworks, where transitions between education and employment remain fragile and the cost of error is high, a dynamic that now extends across multiple labour markets. In settings such as the Peruvian one, these conditions make it imperative to design systems that enable learning, correction, and projection, allowing potential to be converted into sustainable trajectories.
This dynamic is clearly visible in the Peruvian labour market. For many years, gender gaps in Peru were analysed exclusively at the national level, flattening territorial differences and obscuring regional dynamics. When measurements were disaggregated by region through a gender gap index, a consistent pattern emerged: territories with higher levels of gender equity systematically exhibit stronger economic competitiveness.
What these cases make evident is that measuring differently is an act of both thought and institutional courage. By widening analytical lenses and incorporating variables that had previously remained outside the field of vision, relationships emerge that transform how the problem itself is understood. Gender inequality, for instance, ceases to function solely as a social indicator and instead reveals itself as a variable closely linked to economic performance and territorial competitiveness.
What is at stake, then, is not the presence of talent, but the willingness to rethink the lenses through which talent is measured and the insights that become possible when those lenses change.
When referring to her experience in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, Maria Lorente pointed to the limits of conventional ways of analysing such challenges. In contexts shaped by precarious education, poverty, and violence, it became evident that standard responses were failing to reach the core dynamics at play. The experience suggested that the prevailing analytical framework was insufficient to capture certain decisive variables; as a result, interventions tended to focus on symptoms rather than on the underlying factors that sustain them.
From this perspective, it becomes necessary to ask which dimensions remain unaccounted for. The relationship between gender gaps and economic competitiveness demonstrates that reading reality differently allows the focus to shift from symptoms to the levers that enable sustained transformation. In this process, what is not measured is not named, and what is not named is rarely prioritised.
Exploring new variables and testing alternative modes of measurement is what opens the possibility of posing questions of coherence, purpose, and sustainability. Today, for large segments of our societies, that possibility remains, itself, a privilege. In such contexts, urgency continues to precede choice.
The challenge that emerges from this panel thus extends beyond organisational culture. It points to a collective responsibility to confront the loss entailed in leaving capabilities and potential inactivated. Addressing it exceeds the corporate sphere and implicates the state, public policy, civil society, and the decisions that, at multiple levels, determine which trajectories become visible and viable. At this juncture, redesign ceases to operate as a competitive advantage and asserts itself as a structural decision grounded in values.
When talent finds no channels through which to unfold, the result is a social loss, unjust in its effects and inefficient by any economic standard. Confronting this challenge requires holding together, simultaneously, individual adaptive capacity and the institutional frameworks that delineate which opportunities can be recognised, prioritised, and sustained over time. Only then does the question Where do you see yourself? acquire meaning, not as an appeal to individual ambition, but as a test of the systems that claim to make such ambition possible.