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The World Economic Forum has released its biannual survey on what employers around the world expect their businesses to look like in the future and most of the focus is on generative AI. And while the majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they employ as AI automates more tasks at work .
The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, covering more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerged from the survey is that employers believe that many of their workers do not have the necessary skills to do their job as technology evolves.
“AI and big data topped the list of fastest growing skills, closely followed by networking and cyber security as well as technology literacy,” according to the report. “The complement of these technological skills, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, together with curiosity and lifelong learning, are also expected to continue to grow in importance during the period 2025-2030.”
The report appears to be very bad news for graphic designers and legal secretaries, two jobs that employers will apparently need less of in the future, presumably because of AI.
“The presence of Graphic Designers and Legal Secretaries just outside the 10 fastest declining job roles, a prediction for the first time not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate the ability increasing use of GenAI to do knowledge work,” the report says.
Generative artificial intelligence tools are now capable of creating elaborate graphics with just a few text suggestions, although the technology is controversial as it is little more than a plagiarism machine.
“The decline of work in both roles is seen as driven by AI and information processing technologies and by the expansion of digital access. This is a major change from the 2023 edition of the report, when Graphic Designers were considered a moderately growing job and Legal Secretaries did not appear on the expected job growth/decline list,” the report continues.
Employers say they believe attracting employees will involve an emphasis on health and wellness, a rather nebulous category to begin with, but surely a sentiment many in the United States can understand, given our system of fundamentally broken health. The United States is the only rich country in the world that has not achieved universal health care coverage and having health insurance is largely linked to having a job.
The good news? The survey predicts a net increase in the number of jobs created in the next five years, even with the advancement of AI.
“The extrapolation from the forecasts shared by the respondents of the Future of Jobs Survey, on the current trends over the period 2025 to 2030, the creation and destruction of jobs due to the structural transformation of the market of work will account for 22% of today’s total employment,” the report says.
“This is expected to involve the creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of total employment today, amounting to 170 million jobs,” the report continues. “However, this growth is expected to be offset by the displacement of the equivalent of 8% (or 92 million) of current jobs, resulting in a net increase of 7% of total employment, or 78 million of jobs”.
The report emphasizes that although technology is expected to help productivity in the world, the people who use this technology are expected to be more productive.
“Importantly, this analysis only compares the proportions of 2025 and 2030 of total work delivery attributable to human employees, technology or collaboration between the two, respectively, and does not consider the potential change in the absolute amount of work of work (output) that are done,” says the report.
“In other words, both machines and humans could be significantly more productive in 2030 – performing tasks of greater or higher value in the same or less time than it would have taken them to do so in 2025 – so any concern for humans “running” out of things to do “because of automation” would be misplaced.
That, of course, is small consolation for graphic designers. But I hope it’s true for other occupations, especially since the AI has proven to be incredibly stupid and needs a lot of babysitting to make sure it doesn’t screw up a number of tasks.
