GTCI pillars explained: Enable, Attract, Grow, Retain, VT Skills and GA Skills

A pillar rank is the most quoted number after the overall rank, and the most misread. Each pillar is a bundle of indicators with its own logic, its own leaders and its own blind spots, and the overall score is only their plain average. This guide goes through the pillars in turn, with the sub-pillars and indicators beneath them and the countries that led each in the 2025 edition¹.

The six pillars at a glance

Four pillars describe what a country does, called Input, and two describe the skills it ends up with, called Output¹. Enable, Attract, Grow and Retain are the Input pillars; VT Skills and GA Skills are the Output pillars¹.

Each pillar holds two to three sub-pillars, and each sub-pillar three to seven indicators¹. The 2025 edition groups 77 indicators into 14 sub-pillars and six pillars for 135 countries¹. The next section counts how they divide.

How the pillars fit together

Worked example (our arithmetic). Counting the indicators listed under each pillar in Appendix III of the 2025 report gives this split¹:

The unequal counts do not make the pillars unequal. All six pillars are assigned equal weights when they are aggregated into the index¹. A pillar with eight indicators moves the overall score exactly as much as one with nineteen. Because scores are averaged at each level, a single VT Skills indicator therefore carries more weight than a single Enable indicator, an inference from the averaging rules¹.

Worked example (our arithmetic). Take six invented pillar scores and combine them the way the index does¹:

The overall result is not the midpoint of the two sub-indices, which would be 60. Four of the six pillars are Input pillars, so the Input side carries a weight of 67% and the Output side 33%, even though each pillar counts equally¹.

The statistics support the design. Each pillar’s indicators share one statistical dimension, which captures between 79% (Attract) and 92% (Retain) of their variance¹. Sub-pillars are more correlated with their own pillar than with any other¹. Attract has the lowest correlation with the overall GTCI at 0.87 and Retain the highest at 0.95¹.

Enable: the conditions for talent

Enable reflects how far the regulatory and business environments, including competition, management practices and the working of labour markets, create a favourable climate for talent to develop and thrive¹. It has three sub-pillars: Regulatory Landscape, Market Landscape and Business & Labour Landscape¹.

The indicators mix governance scores and plain infrastructure counts. Regulatory Landscape draws on perception indicators for government effectiveness, rule of law, political stability and regulatory quality¹. Market Landscape includes domestic credit to the private sector, R&D expenditure, 3G coverage and internet access in schools¹. Business & Labour Landscape includes national compliance with labour rights and labour-employer cooperation¹.

In 2025 Denmark ranks first on Enable, Finland second and Switzerland third; Singapore is fourth¹. Denmark’s Regulatory Landscape and Business and Labour Landscape both rank second¹. Finland’s Enable rank is anchored in governance, with rule of law first and corruption control second¹.

Germany’s Enable rank fell to 16th from 10th, driven mainly by the Market Landscape, which dropped to 27th from 12th¹. The United States slipped on Enable too, to 7th from 4th¹.

Attract: openness in two directions

Attract looks outward and inward. Externally it measures the draw of foreign resources: productive businesses through foreign direct investment, and creative people through high-skilled migration¹. Internally it measures removal of barriers for groups such as the underprivileged, women and non-native people¹. The two sub-pillars are External Openness and Internal Openness¹.

External Openness includes financial globalisation, migrant stock and international students¹. Internal Openness includes tolerance of minorities, economic empowerment of women and gender parity in high-skilled jobs¹. The AI skills migration indicator, which sits in External Openness, is one of two indicators covered for only about 35% of countries¹.

Luxembourg leads Attract in 2025, Singapore is second and the United Arab Emirates third¹. Luxembourg’s lead rests on External Openness, where it also ranks first¹. The GTCI site adds that five of the top ten economies in External Openness come from Northern Africa and Western Asia⁴. The United States fell on this pillar, to 28th from 22nd¹. China’s Attract result weakened because of FDI restrictions and declining financial globalisation¹.

Grow: more than schooling

Growing talent used to mean education. The index definition now includes apprenticeships, training and continuous education, plus experience and access to growth opportunities¹. Its three sub-pillars are Formal Education, Lifelong Learning and Access to Growth Opportunities¹.

Formal Education draws on vocational and tertiary enrolment, PISA scores in reading, mathematics and science, and the average score of a country’s top universities¹. Lifelong Learning includes business masters education and the share of firms offering formal training¹. Access to Growth Opportunities includes the share of young people not in education, employment or training¹.

The Netherlands leads Grow in 2025, the United States is second and the United Kingdom third¹. The Netherlands is first on the pillar while ranking 6th overall, with strong results in Access to Growth Opportunities (3rd) and Formal Education (4th)¹. Grow (3rd) and GA Skills (6th) are among the United Kingdom’s leading pillars¹. Korea’s slide out of the top 25 included Grow, where it fell to 33rd from 28th and Lifelong Learning dropped to 55th from 35th¹.

Retain: keeping the talent you have

Retaining talent matters because the more talented the person, the wider the global opportunities available to them¹. The pillar has two components: sustainability, both personal and national, and quality of life¹. The sub-pillars are Sustainability and Lifestyle¹.

Sustainability includes pension coverage, environmental performance and vulnerable employment¹. Lifestyle includes personal rights, physician density and sanitation¹. The 2025 edition added household financial resilience, protection against future disasters and employee wellbeing¹. High-income economies, particularly the Nordics, lead on household financial resilience⁴.

Norway leads Retain in 2025, Sweden is second and Denmark third¹. Norway’s first place is anchored in Sustainability (1st) and universal pension coverage (1st)¹.

Retain is also where the most surprising 2025 result sits. Singapore ranks first overall but only 31st on Retain, up from 38th, helped by personal rights, physician density and personal safety¹. A country can lead the index with a weak Retain pillar if the skills pillars carry it.

VT Skills: mid-level skills and employability

Mid-level skills, labelled VT Skills, are technical or professional skills acquired through vocational or professional training and experience¹. Their impact is measured through employability: indicators around skills gaps and labour market mismatches, and the adequacy of education systems¹. The sub-pillars are Mid-level Skills and Employability¹.

Mid-level Skills includes the workforce and population with secondary education, technicians and associate professionals, and labour productivity per employee¹. Employability includes skills matching, the share of workers whose education matches their occupation, and highly educated unemployment¹. The lowest correlation between any sub-pillar and its pillar is 0.82, between Employability and VT Skills¹.

The Czech Republic leads VT Skills in 2025, the United States is second and Switzerland third¹. Germany’s strongest pillar is VT Skills at 5th, supported by technicians and associate professionals at 2nd¹. Singapore’s VT Skills fell to 13th from 3rd, a decline the index links to emerging pressures in mid-level skills and employability¹. Chile, 39th overall, leads Latin America and the Caribbean on a strong foundation in mid-level skills¹.

GA Skills: adaptability, soft skills and high-level work

In 2025 the former Global Knowledge Skills pillar was relabelled Generalist Adaptive Skills, to better represent the broad-based and collaborative skill sets that contemporary labour markets increasingly demand¹. The 2017 edition called it Global Knowledge Skills, the sixth pillar². High-level skills here means the creativity and problem-solving required of workers in professional, managerial or leadership roles, and their economic impact is evaluated through innovation, entrepreneurship and high-value industries¹.

The sub-pillars are High-level Skills and Talent Impact¹. High-level Skills includes professionals, researchers, senior officials and managers and digital skills, plus the new indicators on soft skills and AI talent concentration¹. Talent Impact includes ICT services exports, high-value exports, new business density and scientific journal articles¹.

Soft skills and workforce adaptability

The rename recognizes the growing importance of soft cooperative skills, adaptability and interdisciplinary problem-solving¹. High-income economies dominate the global top ten in soft skills, led by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Finland, and the Philippines is the only lower middle-income economy in that top ten⁴. The GTCI site frames adaptability as the new driver of competitiveness, which the GA Skills dimension operationalizes⁴.

Singapore ranks first on GA Skills in 2025, Israel second and Ireland third¹. The United States fell on this pillar to 13th from 5th, a shift that reflects the introduction of new metrics alongside lower outcomes¹.

Pillar leaders in GTCI 2025

Read across the table and a pattern shows. No single country leads more than one pillar¹. Denmark, Switzerland, the United States and Singapore each appear twice, and the pillar leaders are not the overall top three: the Netherlands leads in growing talent and Luxembourg in attracting it¹. Denmark, Finland and Switzerland rank near the top in enabling and retaining talent¹. Switzerland is the model of balance: every pillar sits in the top ten, and Enable and VT Skills, both 3rd, are its best¹. For the full 2025 ranking, see the GTCI 2025 results.

What changed in the pillars between editions

The pillar structure has held since the start; the labels and indicators have moved. The 2017 report grouped 65 variables into 14 sub-pillars², the 2023 report 69 indicators into 14 sub-pillars³, and the 2025 model 77 indicators into 14 sub-pillars¹. The sub-pillar count stayed at 14 while the indicator count grew.

The 2025 edition introduced indicators such as AI-related and soft skills, workforce resilience and employee well-being¹. Its adjustments table lists as new additions the household financial resilience, protection against future disasters and employee wellbeing indicators in Retain, and soft skills and mobile apps development in GA Skills¹. Because indicators changed, a pillar rank in 2025 is not a clean continuation of the same pillar in 2023, and the GTCI methodology page explains why comparisons across editions need caution.

Who builds the pillars: INSEAD, Portulans and the JRC audit

INSEAD Business School launched the GTCI in 2013¹. The 2025 edition marks the beginning of a partnership between INSEAD and the Portulans Institute¹. Felipe Monteiro is the academic director, and Paul Evans, who co-founded the index, was its former academic director¹.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre audits every edition independently, testing the statistical structure of the pillars described above¹. For how the audit tests the pillars, read how the index is calculated. For the plain-English overview, start with what the GTCI is.

Reading a pillar rank without misreading it

Three cautions apply to every pillar number in this guide.

• A pillar rank belongs to its edition. Rankings are not directly comparable between one year and another, because the framework, data and sample change¹.
• A pillar rank is not the overall rank. Between 33% and 60% of countries rank differently on the GTCI than on each of the six pillars¹.
• A top pillar can sit beside a weak one. Denmark leads Enable but ranks 10th on both Attract and Grow, and Singapore leads GA Skills but ranks 31st on Retain¹.

Pillar leaders are also a reading of the model, not a verdict on a country’s workforce. The rest of the index is explained in the method section, and the 2025 report has every pillar table.