The global job market is shifting. Here's how to unlock opportunity in the jobs transition

The global labour market is undergoing profound change driven by technological progress and discovery, economic shifts and the ongoing green transition. Particularly given recent major advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence, and the workforce transformations precipitated by the Covid-19 crisis, the jobs landscape is set for further reshaping in the near future.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 projected that by 2027, 23% of jobs will change, with 69 million new roles anticipated and 83 million existing positions expected to be displaced, resulting in a net loss of 14 million jobs.

The Future of Jobs Report 2023 also emphasized the urgent need to provide adequate social protection to workers not protected by full-time employment contracts. Nearly 2 billion people work in an informal setting worldwide, which represents close to 70% of workers in developing and low-income countries, and 18% in high income countries. Given their susceptibility to economic shocks and displacement from technological change, informal workers are a labour market cohort in need of attention from policy setters for income security in the short term and a shift towards workplace formalization in the long term.

In this rapidly changing economic context, the Forum’s most recent report, Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow, explores the dynamics of job transitions, highlighting the critical role of taking a proactive approach in preparing the workforce for emerging roles.

Job transitions are not only an inevitable response to the evolving demands of the global labour market. They are also a critical mechanism for optimizing economic productivity and enhancing individual well-being. As technological advancements, economic shifts and the green transition disrupt traditional employment patterns, the ability of workers to transition into new roles is essential for maintaining employment and achieving social mobility.

The Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow report finds that with targeted reskilling and upskilling efforts, multistakeholder collaboration and effective worker safety nets, job transitions can be strategically managed for the benefit of all. In facilitating these transitions, economies can better align labour supply with demand, reduce unemployment and enable workers to secure higher-paying, more stable jobs in growth sectors. Moreover, proactive job transitions help mitigate the adverse effects of job displacement, ensuring that workers are not left behind in the face of economic change but are instead positioned to thrive in the new economy.

This paper builds on the Forum’s prior research that mapped out job transitions in the US, published across two papers: Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, and Towards a Reskilling Revolution: Industry-Led Action for the Future of Work. In those papers, the focus was on jobs that are expected to decline in the medium-term due to automation from technological advancements. To identify practical job transitions for current workers in these jobs, two broad criteria are considered: viability and desirability.

This latest white paper goes beyond earlier work by providing a policy framework to facilitate job transitions, highlighting: (1) Reskilling and upskilling for new opportunities, (2) Improving employee-employer matching, (3) Worker safety nets and (4) Multi-stakeholder collaboration to break through industry barriers.

This paper then builds on and broadens the geographical scope of earlier work in Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, which focused only on the US, and expands coverage to 15 countries across seven regions, providing a global understanding of job transition opportunities. For each region, researchers examine data on job transitions from job posting data scraped from the web, in collaboration with Lightcast, and highlight several case studies [Link to 7941] that emphasize the region’s potential.

While our regional analysis provides detailed coverages of individual countries, we number of notable trends have emerged across all regions studied: