The small Arabian country rocketed up a recent ranking. How?
Believing - or investigating - any individual measurement in reputational security or soft power is usually a problem. In a space that is increasingly, often usefully though sometimes problematically, awash in rankings and indexes, the aggregate big picture is more important than a single data point.
That said, sometimes a single data point screams curiosity. So it was for us belatedly sifting through the World Competitiveness Center's 2025 World Talent Ranking. The Center, housed in the highly-respected IMD Business School in Switzerland, publishes quite a few ancillary rankings in addition to their flagship competitiveness table, which is seen as a leading resource alongside peers from The Economist Intelligence Unit and World Bank.
Most latest edition rankings feature a few notable surprises, and in this one, it was obvious. Tiny frontier market Oman came 27th worldwide, after previously being unranked (the table lists the top 70 countries). It was not the only debutant, though the others were further back in the pack. Oman, instead, placed ahead of most of its GCC peers, as well as the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, New Zealand and numerous other developed and emerging markets alike known to be actively focused on talent innovation.
Talent, like brand, is a tricky concept to pin down in real time. Its quantitative measure (combined with qualitative data, as was the case here) often feels more like an indication of potential rather than present state. IMD appears to concede as much in its methodology. But there are still important considerations in this result.
First, can it be actually true? That is, can a small - albeit financially ascendant - market, one that still has a way to go in its overall economic development, move this far forward in the global competition for talent, in a year? If the investment is there, the right models and implementation, the technology, and most importantly, the demographics and passion among the citizenry are motivated?
Maybe. Probably not to this extent. What's interesting, however, is the notion that there is an opening - a softness in this particular and highly-marketable space - to commit to making broad leaps. Which leads to the second point: competition for higher-quality EM talent has been lively for decades, a slow burn that relied primarily on the comparatively lower cost of labor (and investment therein) and less on sophistication or structure or long-termism. That appears to be shifting. In Oman, clearly, though also for new entrants Namibia and Kenya (where one of the world's largest megaprojects has education at its core).
Perhaps a final point references back to Oman's positioning among GCC neighbors, all of which are clustered around the upper-middle of the table (Qatar, in no surprise, shot up the rankings this year, too). Oman may well be benefiting from regionalization and the collective sense among researchers that this part of the world is serious in its intentions. Even if its Vision 2040 is ten years behind its much larger northern neighbor, Oman appears to be joining the party, with talent as a vehicle.
The Takeaway: Competitiveness is the single most important aspect of global reputation today. Within that constellation, talent is rising in visibility, sufficiently squishy in concept, and can have a genuine impact across society (which is not always guaranteed, even by multibillions in investment, in other soft power applications). Ironically this may become even truer of talent in the near term with generalized adoption of artificial intelligence.
While we should be wary of an orbital rise in any ranking, the Omani case is more than curious. It may instead provide the latest - albeit rather shiny - signal of a broader story.
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