The World Economic Forum released its bi-annual survey on what employers worldwide expect their businesses to look like in the future and much of the attention is on generative AI. And while a 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 on the job.
The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves.
“AI and big data top the list of fastest-growing skills, followed closely by networks and cybersecurity as well as technology literacy,” according to the report. “Complementing these technology-related skills, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, along with curiosity and lifelong learning, are also expected to continue to rise in importance over the 2025-2030 period.”
The report seems to be very bad news for graphic designers and legal secretaries, two jobs that employers will apparently need fewer of in the future, presumably due to AI.
“The presence of both Graphic Designers and Legal Secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI’s increasing capacity to perform knowledge work,” the report states.
Generative artificial intelligence tools are now able to create elaborate graphics with just a few text prompts, though the tech is controversial since it’s little more than a plagiarism machine.
“Job decline in both roles is seen as driven by both AI and information processing technologies as well as by broadening digital access. This is a major change from the report’s 2023 edition, when Graphic Designers were considered a moderately growing job and Legal Secretaries did not feature in the expected job growth/decline list,” the report continues.
Employers say they believe attracting employees will involve an emphasis on health and well-being, a rather nebulous category to begin with, but certainly, a sentiment that many in the U.S. can understand, given our fundamentally broken healthcare system. The U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world that hasn’t achieved universal health care coverage and having health insurance is largely tied to having a job.
The good news? The survey predicts a net growth in the number of jobs created over the next five years, even with AI advances.
“Extrapolating from the predictions shared by Future of Jobs Survey respondents, on current trends over the 2025 to 2030 period job creation and destruction due to structural labour-market transformation will amount to 22% of today’s total jobs,” the report states.
“This is expected to entail the creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of today’s total employment, 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 net growth of 7% of total employment, or 78 million jobs.”
The report emphasizes that even though technology is expected to help productivity around the world, the humans who are using that tech are expected to be more productive.
“Importantly, this analysis only compares the 2025 and 2030 proportions of total task 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 tasks (output) getting done,” the report states.
“In other words, 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.”
That, of course, is small consolation to graphic designers. But it will hopefully turn out to be true for other occupations, especially since AI has proved to be incredibly dumb and needs a lot of babysitting to make sure it doesn’t mess up any number of tasks.
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