Future of Jobs Report 2025
Summary of survey from 1000 global companies predicts 170 million jobs will be created by 2030
This week we’re going to explore the World Economic Forum ‘Future of Jobs’ Report 2025. Whilst not the only, or necessary best, it’s surely a very valid and thorough piece of research that has a broad point of view and solid methodology and database (1,000 companies, employing 14 million employees). Probably slightly more focused on mid-large size businesses than OPB (just coined it; ‘One-Person-Businesses’) or SMBs.
It’s mostly a reflection of what managers at these companies think, than employees. We know that this is not reflective of the whole picture, but it’s important to register this perspective to then be able to understand better areas of disagreement. There’s some good news (creation of 170 million jobs by 2030 and bad news – displacement of 92 million current jobs) but also some interesting data points on things like Skill-based hiring, and % of work estimated done by machines versus humans (34%, so yeah humans will still exist in 2030).
Goal is to digest and comment this for you so you don’t have to wade through 290 pages and redundant info.
We’re going to cover:
Drivers of labour transformation (70% of the global workforce will be from emerging countries, Digitalization is still lower than you’d think)
Jobs outlook (Which categories of jobs are declining and which ones rising)
Skills outlook (Are companies hiring based on experience or skills?)
Workforce strategies (Who’s going to do the work, humans or machines?)
Let’s go!
💎 Key Drivers of Labour Transformation
This section analyses what companies deem as top drivers changing work. (Un)surprisingly, broadening digital access is keeping its #1 position because even though we may not feel that in our immediate circle of context, we need to remember that ‘only’ 67.5% of the world’s population currently has access to the internet. In addition, digital access means capability for some processes and bureaucracy to be digitalized, and you don’t need to look very far to see that still impacts both private and public organizations. If you think about it, the level of digitalization of businesses and processes is a good indicator of our human tendency to think that the future comes so much earlier than it actually does.
Economic, geo-political and climate factors are colse runner-ups and are less seen stealing the ‘media’ stage than technology. Take an example: most tech companies will be mentioning AI dozens of times in earnings calls, but may not touch upon things like the rise of cost of living or disruption by climate change. While the former is a classic ‘frog in a boiling water’ problem, with inflation being a key problem for the majority of countries, the latter is even less visible. The question is: how can a vicious cycle of cost-cutting be sustainable and keep creating growth and prosperity all-things considered?
Demographic shifts are another interesting trend. These have a direct impact on global labour supply: currently balanced between lower-income (49%) and higher-income (51%) working-age populations, this distribution is expected to shift by 2050, with lower-income countries projected to hold 59% of the global working-age population.
Geographies with a demographic dividend, such as India and Sub- Saharan African nations, will supply nearly two-thirds of new workforce entrants in the coming years.
Some have also predicted that aging high-income economies with shrinking labour forces might increasingly look to deeper automation to counterbalance some of these demographic trends.
According to the World Bank, over the next 10 years, an unprecedented 1.2 billion young people in emerging economies will become working-age adults, while the job market in these economies is only expected to create 420 million additional jobs – risking leaving nearly 800 million young people in economic uncertainty
💼 Jobs Outlook
In the next five 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. This amounts to a net employment increase of 7%, or 78 million jobs.
Seeing it this way, it may look pretty rosy. But even if the projection is based on a lot of assumptions and doesn’t take into account any ‘black swan’ event (who would have predicted the most recent wars or even technological ‘booms’?) the staggering truth is that the current trend is 30 million jobs lost per decade.
If we look at the specific job categories, we’re seeing very similar rankings to the past years. I think the current methodology is missing out on mapping also new categories of job roles, so maybe there’s some inspiration WEF can get from our last post on 35 New AI Roles to Watch out For? Just saying…
One chart I really liked was the one on human-machine division of work, where the highest jump is seen by tasks performed by technology on its own. This is another reason why the category of ‘human-machine’ manager will be up and coming; not only will we need to create, innovate, assess AI systems, but also figure out how to optimize collaboration. Will it be easier than optimizing collaboration between humans? My 2c: less emotion and subjectivity won’t be able to compensate common sense and empathy.
This work does not consider the potential change in the absolute amount of work tasks (output) getting done. In other words, the arguement is that both machines and humans might be significantly more productive in 2030 – performing more or higher value tasks in the same or less amount of time than it would have taken them to do so in 2025 – so any concern about humans “running out of things to do” due to automation would be misplaced.
Now, for the 1M$: if an increasing amount of a firm’s total output and income is derived from advanced machines and proprietary algorithms, to what extent will human workers be able to get their share? Are we going to look at Universal Basic Income or will companies be able to introduce some different incentive and compensation mechanisms so that employees don’t feel threatened or demotivated from this trend or even to contribute to its acceleration?
🔧 Skills Outlook
Interestingly, the ‘skill stability’ temperature has improved since 2020 (Covid) and it can be due to two main reasons: 1) Some reskilling and upskilling has already started/taken place 2) We’re seeing much more realistic truths about what AI can and can’t do. I’m going for the second option.
As for core skills, it’s not big news but it’s important to highlight how so many of the top ones are soft/human centered skills that are poised to have a huge huge comeback.
Human vs GenAI capability benchmarks are the new black, as we’re now seeing every advancement in LLM models being accompanied by a press release showing how it compares to performance by professionals in each specific area.
📦 Workforce Strategies
Now onto the big needs for organizations in the next five years. Focus on 2: Organizational culture and resistance to change. This is huge, for two reasons. The first one, is that (I know, I’ve said it) it takes so much more time to adopt a new technology, much more than we’d like to think. Even worse if it’s changing every day and feels like a moving target. I mean, think about the internet and e-Commerce. It took a global pandemic to get a huge portion of businesses to get them to reconsider or accelerate their digital transition. Resistance to change, is human. That argues for more data-driven and structured HR work.
Skill assessments are also a hot topic. This is because work experience becomes harder to measure and more commoditized. Gone are the days where having ‘digital’ experience used to be a rarity, now each one of us is competing against hugely upskilled and economically competitive workforces in emerging economies. India is a talent power-house, and after taking some of the hottest leadership roles in big tech, it’s now starting to take more and more of the other functions too.
This calls for pre-employment tests, both technical and psychometric to evaluate behaviour and fit. Removing academic degree requirements and conducting skill-based hiring is an increasingly recognized approach to expanding talent availability. All of this is taking over traditional credentials like university degrees, which are decreasing in importance year over year (and I wrote about this in ‘The Death of Degrees and the Rise of Company Universities’)
💨 TLDR - Is this too Optimistic?
The report says that Job creation will dominate job destruction – which is fairly optimistic. Whilst I think that there are many reasons to feel that way (we published at least 5 good reasons to be optimistic about work in 2025) it’s tougher to say yet over the long run.
This report is still assuming the status quo with some tweaks - but what if AI really does radically carve out the middle-managers, knowledge workers, designers, HR, marketeers?
Work needs to be redesigned both for individuals and for organizations, with a scientific and rational approach - something that doesn’t feel to be happening at the moment. There’s a lack of specific skill sets in the right places, but it’s also hard to stop a moving train. That’s why the real game-changers will be AI ‘Native’ companies and individuals, much like it’s happened with other technological revolutions. There’s a big lag, and the world is increasingly becoming polarized and bi-modal. On one side, we'll see companies embracing AI and automation, redesigning workflows to leverage these tools, and upskilling their workforce to thrive in this new environment. These AI-native organizations will be agile, data-driven, and highly productive, with employees empowered to focus on high-value tasks and creative problem-solving. On the other side, organizations resistant to change will cling to outdated processes, ill-equipped to compete in this evolving landscape. Their work will likely remain stagnant, characterized by inefficient practices, low employee engagement, and a growing disconnect from the evolving demands of the market. This divergence will further deepen the divide, leaving those who fail to adapt increasingly behind - and many categories of roles will change because of it.
Tune in for more on this topic (how to design a new generation of work) in the next editions!
Also, if you’re interested in more details and sections on specific regions and industries, go check out the full document.
Ciao,
Matteo
Thank you. Useful analysis.
Excellent summary. Great analysis