Peter CAPPELLI

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He served as the Kingdom of Bahrain's Senior Adviser on Employment Policy from 2003 to 2005, and since 2007 he has been a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore.

He has degrees in Industrial Relations from Cornell University and in Labour Economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and a faculty member at MIT, the University of Illinois, and the University of California at Berkeley. He was a staff member on the U.S. Secretary of Labor's Commission on Workforce Quality and Labour Market Efficiency from 1988 to 1990, was Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce and a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center on Post-Secondary Improvement at Stanford University.

Professor Cappelli has served on three committees of the National Academy of Sciences and three panels of the National Goals for Education. He was recently named by HR Magazine as one of the top 5 most influential thinkers in management and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He received the 2009 PRO award from the International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters for contributions to human resources. He serves on the Global Agenda Council on Employment for the World Economic Forum, and a number of advisory boards.

Professor Cappelli's recent research examines changes in employment relations in the U.S. and their implications. These publications include The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce, which examines the decline in lifetime employment relationships, Talent Management: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, which outlines the strategies that employers should consider in developing and managing talent (named "Best Business Book" for 2008 by Booz-Allen), and The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders are Revolutionizing Management (with colleagues), which describes a mission-driven and employee-focused approach to strategy and competitiveness.

His 2010 book Managing the Older Worker (with Bill Novelli) dispels myths about older workers and describes how employers can best engage them. Why Good People Can't Get Jobs (2012) identifies shortfalls with current hiring and training practices and has been excerpted in Time Magazine (online), and reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and most major business publications. Related work on managing retention, e-recruitment, and changing career paths appears in the Harvard Business Review.

In awarding this distinction to Peter Cappelli, the University of Liège wishes to honour the research also carried out by its faculty, HEC Liège, in the fields of Human Resource Management, and supply chain and digital transformation. Peter Cappelli has notably explored the links between HR and the supply chain function, and more recently has been interested in the challenges of integrating artificial intelligence into management. He is considered one of the most influential researchers on the positioning of HR in the transformation of organisations. He has been collaborating with HEC Liège Recherche for several years and we are proud to frequently put his work into action.

DOCToRS HONORIS CAUSA upon proposal by faculties in 2020