Will you Deep-Dive or Deep-Drive into your Future...

What does your Future look like, asking Mystic Meg.... 

Its finally here! The Future of Jobs report is out by World Economic Forum 2025. If you haven’t had a chance to read the report, good thing you are here… I’m going to summarise some key facts for you… Let’s go!

As we enter 2025, the breakthrough with AI is beginning to reshape industries and tasks across all sectors. So, does this mean AI will take over our jobs in the next 10 years? (I think so!)

The five macrotrends currently being the hot topic right now in our economy are: technological change, geoeconomic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and green transition within our labour market till 2030. 60% of employers expected to transform their business by 2030. Advancements in technologies from AI to Robotics and Automation aims to increase by 86% within the next year.

Cost of living has ranked the second-most transformative trend overall with half of employers expecting a reduction in global inflation. The creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of today’s employment, amounting to 170 million job. Frontline jobs roles are predicted to see the largest growth in volume including farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, sales, warehouse and food processing workers. It’s also reports, care economy jobs such as nursing, social work and counselling professionals are expected to grow significantly over the next 5-years.

On average, workers can expect two-fifths of their existing skill set to be transformed or become outdated over the period from 2025-2030. Skills instability has decreased by 44% in2023 to 2024. Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skills among employers, with 7/10 companies considering this skills as essential in 2025. This followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, along with leadership and social influence.

Skills gaps are categorically considered the biggest barrier to business transformation, with 63% of employers identifying them as a major cause to career progression. 40% of companies are planning to reduce staff as their skills become less relevant and 50% of companies are planning to transition staff from declining to growing roles.

Employees health and well-being is a top focus for talent attraction, with 64% of employers who surveyed identified it’s a key still to increasing talent availability. In addition, adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion remains on rise. Employers reported 83% are beginning to put initiatives in place for employers to feel more inclusive in their workplace.

By 2030, 52% of employers are allocating a greater share of their revenue to wages, with only 18% expecting this share to decline. Two-thirds of employers plan to hire talent with specific AI skills, while 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks.

Companies expect these macro-trends to drive industry transformation by 2030.

Unemployment:

Reductions in unemployment has lagged for women. Since 2020, global unemployment rate peaked for both sexes at 6.6%, the rate for men declined by 4.8%. Youth unemployment rates is our indictor to labour market health. Global youth unemployment rate has remained elevated by 13%. While the global NEET rate remains flat since 2024, 1,000 global employers, collectively employing more than 1.4 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. This shows macrotrends and technology will influence industry transformation and employment in the next 5-years.

Since the release of Chat GPT in November 2022, investment flows into AI have increased nearly eightfold. The influx of capital has been accomplished by investment in the physical infrastructure needed to support these emerging technologies. The disparity between middle-income economies experiencing unprecedented diffusion of generative AI technologies among individual users compared to low-income economies remain largely on the margin with minimal use of technology and digital skills.

Looking further ahead, without appropriate decision-making frameworks, economic incentive structures and government regulations, there remains a risk that technological developments will be focused on replacing human work, which could increase inequality and unemployment. Currently, robot installation are heavily concentrated with 80% in countries such as China, Japan, United States, The Republic of Korea and Germany.

As of early 2025, global economic outlook appears to be shaped by combination of cautious optimism and persistent uncertainties. Inflation remains high in services with half of all surveyed employers are expecting it to drive transformation.

Figure below: In the next 5-years, 170 million jobs are projected to be created and 92 million jobs to be displaced. Constituting a structural labour market churn of 22% of the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the dataset being studied. The amounts to a net employment increase of 7% or 78 million jobs.

Education-related roles such as university and Higher Education Teachers and Secondary Education Teachers are predicted to be among the biggest job creators in the next five years globally. Additionally, software and application developers, general and operations manager and project managers are among the job categories driving the most net job growth. Conversely, the fastest declining job roles will be clerical and secretarial workers with predication to see largest net job decline in the next five-years.

Skills Evolution

The tops skills on the rise are leadership, social influence, talent management, analytical thinking and environmental stewardship. Respondents identified sensory-processing abilities; reading, writing and mathematics; dependability and attention to detail as among the most stable skills. The core skills by 2030 highlights AI and big data; resilience and technology literacy. Also, cybersecurity was ranked top 10 skill to be developed by 2030, although not many organisations are currently considering this skill yet. The rise in training is evident across all industries, however a few industries stand out which are from Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing are sectors that have seen decline in training. Whereas, insurance, pension management and supply chains have seen most significant rise in workers completing training.

Talent Availability

Employers’ outlook on talent availability has decreased compared to the results in 2024. 29% of business expect talent availability to improve over 2025-2030 period. Employers remain more broadly optimistic about the outlook for talent development, with 44% expect improvements in their ability to retain talent. Expectations around talent development shows significant regional variation. For example, companies headquartered in Eastern Asia, Sub Saharan Africa, and Central Asia generally report high levels of optimism for the next five years. By contrast, businesses headquartered in Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa, and Northern America are more cautious than global averages with regard to their expectations.

By 2030, transformation of the Infrastructure sector is foreseen to be driven by a need to increase investments in carbon reduction, climate adaptation and digitalisation. As a result, new job roles are expected to be created for Big Data Specialists and Organisational Development specialists. Almost 70% of respondents expect reskilling and upskilling to improve talent retention and enhance competitiveness and productivity of their company, with 50% planning to increase talent mobility through training programmes.

To conclude, skills gap remain the predominant barrier to transformation across most industries and economies which will impact the five-macro trends from 2025-2030. So, let’s see where we end up in 2030 with our labour market. See you then!

Read the whole report here:

The Future of Jobs Report 2025 | World Economic Forum

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Thank you for visiting my page. 

Chandni Patel, Educationalist and Advocate for Mental Health 

Disclaimer: All information has been compressed from the Future of Jobs Reports 2025.