Printable Biography of Dr. Peter Cappelli

His research has examined changes in the workplace and their effects on employers. He is particularly interested in changes in the ways companies recruit, manage talent, and appraise and manage performance. Peter was named one of the 25 most influential people in the field of human capital by Vault.com and one of the top 100 people in the field of recruiting by Recruiter.com. Additionally, he was elected to the National Academy of Human Resources, and—in 2004—named editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives. The journal reaches more than 15,000 international academics and practitioners committed to the advancement of research, learning, teaching, and practice in the management field.

Peter is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. His work focuses on human resource practices, talent and performance management, and public policy related to employment. He advises to organizations on the development of managerial and executive talent by helping his clients better understand how careers and career paths have changed, how these changes require companies to think about managing talent from a more strategic perspective, and how individuals should now think about managing their own careers.

Professor Cappelli’s research examines changes in employment relations in the U.S. and their implications. His publications include Change at Work, a major study for the National Planning Association that found that employees paid a considerable price for the restructuring of U.S. industry and The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce, which examines the challenges associated with the decline in lifetime employment relationships. His recent work on managing retention, electronic recruiting, and changing career paths appears in the Harvard Business Review. His forthcoming book, Talent on Demand, considers the strategies that employers should consider in developing and managing talent.

Professor Cappelli is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. He served as Senior Advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2003-2005 and currently is a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore. He has degrees in industrial relations from Cornell University and in labor economics from Oxford, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, 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 Labor Market Efficiency from 1988 to 1990, 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 serves on the advisory boards of several companies, and is the founding editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives.