The Future of Jobs Report
The Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum provides the timely insights needed to orient labour markets and workers towards opportunity today and in the future of work. Now in its third edition, the report maps the jobs and skills of the future, tracking the pace of change and direction of travel. This year we find that while technology-driven job creation is still expected to outpace job destruction over the next five years, the economic contraction is reducing the rate of growth in the jobs of tomorrow. There is a renewed urgency to take proactive measures to ease the transition of workers into more sustainable job opportunities. There is room for measured optimism in the data, but supporting workers will require global, regional and national public-private collaboration at an unprecedented scale and speed.
The report’s key findings include:
- The pace of technology adoption is expected to remain unabated and may accelerate in some areas.
- Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double-disruption’ scenario for workers.
- Although the number of jobs destroyed will be surpassed by the number of ‘jobs of tomorrow’ created, in contrast to previous years, job creation is slowing while job destruction accelerates.
- Skills gaps continue to be high as indemand skills across jobs change in the next five years.
- The future of work has already arrived for a large majority of the online white-collar workforce.
- In the absence of proactive efforts, inequality is likely to be exacerbated by the dual impact of technology and the pandemic recession.
- Online learning and training is on the rise but looks different for those in employment Executive Summary The Future of Jobs 6 and those who are unemployed.
- The window of opportunity to reskill and upskill workers has become shorter in the newly constrained labour market.
- Despite the current economic downturn, the large majority of employers recognize the value of human capital investment.
- Companies need to invest in better metrics of human and social capital through adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics and matched with renewed measures of human capital.
- The public sector needs to provide stronger support for reskilling and upskilling for at-risk or displaced workers.
Read the report here.
Published October 2020