The world of work is changing fast. By 2027, businesses predict that almost half (44%) of workers’ core skills will be disrupted, found the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report.
Technology, the report said, is moving faster than companies can design and scale up their training programs.
AI, according to the report, is widely reported to be a key disrupter, but other factors, including the green transition and geo-economic conditions, will also see “churn” for almost a quarter of jobs by 2027 – a measure of disruption that includes both emerging and declining jobs.
The Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 found that “lack of economic opportunity” ranked as one of the top 10 biggest risks among risk experts over the next two years.
Over the longer term, barriers to economic mobility could grow, locking out large segments of the population from economic opportunities, the report found.
Upskilling and development will be key in the coming years to ensure an equitable future of work. This was one of the messages from the Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where there were multiple high-level discussions on the theme of ‘Creating Jobs and Growth for a New Era’.
Here are some of the predicted work and workplace trends for 2024 that came out of those sessions and reports published during Davos.
1. Generative AI boosts productivity, unevenly
In 2024, most chief economists surveyed by the Forum believe generative AI will increase productivity and innovation in high-income countries. But for low-income countries, just over a third think this will be the case.
Productivity boosts are expected in knowledge-heavy industries, including IT and digital communications, financial and professional services, medical and healthcare services, retail, manufacturing, engineering and construction, energy and logistics.
These potential benefits are in “sharp contrast with concerns about the risks of automation, job displacement and degradation”, says the report.
Almost three-quarters (73%) of chief economists surveyed “do not foresee a net positive impact on employment in low-income economies”.
2. Digital jobs keep growing
By 2030, the number of global digital jobs is expected to rise to around 92 million. These are generally higher-paid roles, according to the Forum’s white paper, The Rise of Digital Jobs.
Digital jobs could help to balance skill shortages in higher-income countries, while boosting opportunities for younger workers in lower-income countries: “If managed well, global digital jobs present an opportunity to utilize talent around the world, widening the talent pool available to employers and providing economic growth pathways to countries across the income spectrum.”
3. Unemployment levels could rise
The labour market showed resilience in 2023, with employment remaining high, said Gilbert Fossoun Houngbo, Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), in the Davos session ‘What to Expect From Labour Markets’.
But he said ILO projections in early January suggested the global unemployment rate could rise from 5.1% to 5.2% in 2024, with an extra two million workers expected to be looking for jobs.
In the US, the jobs market remained stronger than expected for the first month of the year, with more than 350,000 new jobs added. The unemployment rate for January was 3.7%, close to a 50-year low, according to The Guardian.
Houngbo said ILO data shows inequalities persist between low- and high-income countries, while young people are 3.5 times more at risk of being unemployed than the rest of the adult population and “many workers are struggling to pay bills, which is very worrisome”.
The impact of AI on jobs was not going to be “an employment apocalypse”, but that reskilling, upskilling and lifelong learning would be key to managing the transition to augmentation, he stressed.
4. More pop-up offices
LinkedIn has seen a drop in the number of fully remote job postings, from a peak of 20% in April 2022, to just 8% in December 2023, said co-founder Allen Blue, speaking in a Davos session ‘The Role of the Office is Still TBC’.
But employee interest in taking remote or hybrid jobs remains high, at around 46% of applications.
“The office is going to be in competition with working from home … that’s a good thing for the office,” he said, as management would need to innovate and create a workplace environment that “emphasizes dynamic human interaction”.
Young people taking their first job want human connection, so they’re more interested in hybrid than remote roles.
Martin Kocher, Austria’s Federal Minister of Labour and Economy, said that some Austrian villages are actually paying for pop-up community office spaces, because people don’t want to work from home, and they can make use of other amenities close by.
He predicted the development of more pop-up office spaces away from company headquarters.
5. Skills will become even more important
With 23% of jobs expected to change in the next five years, according to the Future of Jobs Report, millions of people will need to move between declining and growing jobs.
Coursera CEO, Jeff Maggioncaldaand Denis Machuel, CEO of Adecco Group AG, joined the Davos session ‘The Race to Reskill’ to discuss the transferability of skills, and the potential of AI to help with personalized learning and productivity, which also levels the playing field for job opportunities globally.
But the key is in learning how to use AI and digital technologies, as Code.org Founder and CEO, Hadi Partovi, pointed out in the session ‘Education Meets AI’.
When people think about job losses due to AI, he said, the risk isn’t people losing their jobs to AI: “It’s losing their job to somebody else who knows how to use AI. That is going to be a much greater displacement.
“It’s not that the worker gets replaced by just a robot or a machine in most cases, especially for desk jobs, it’s that some better or more educated worker can do that job because they can be twice as productive or three times as productive.
“The imperative is to teach how AI tools work to every citizen, and especially to our young people.”
6. More women enter the workforce
In 2020, the World Bank found that potential gains from closing economic gender gaps could unlock a “gender dividend” of $172 trillion for the global economy.
But the Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023 found that the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap has only closed by just over 60%.
Several sessions at Davos looked at how inclusion could benefit the economy, particularly by helping mothers return to the workforce, which could close skills gaps.
“There are 606 million women of working age in the world who are not working because of their unpaid care responsibilities, compared to 40 million men,” Reshma Saujani, Founder and CEO of Moms First, explained in a session on the ‘Workforce Behind the Workforce’.
“At Moms First, we’re working with over 130 companies in every sector, who are saying, ‘I don’t have enough workers’. We are working with them to redesign their childcare packages and increase their subsidies.
“Childcare pays for itself. When you offer childcare to employees, you get higher worker productivity and lower rates of attrition, and greater rates of retention. We have to look at care as an economic issue that world leaders must actually do something about.”