Saadia Zahidi
Managing Director, World Economic Forum

Since its first edition in 2016, the World Economic Forum’s bi-annual Future of Jobs Report has tracked the labour-market impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, identifying the potential scale of occupational disruption and growth alongside strategies for empowering job transitions from declining to emerging roles.

In 2023, labour-market transformations driven by technological breakthroughs, such as the coming of age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), are being compounded by economic and geopolitical disruptions and growing social and environmental pressures. This fourth edition of the Future of Jobs Report therefore broadens its scope beyond technological change to also consider and address the labour-market impact of a multitude of concurrent trends, including the green and energy transitions, macroeconomic factors, and geo- economic and supply-chain shifts.

Similar to previous editions, the core of the 2023 Future of Jobs Report is based on a unique survey- based data set covering the a wide cross-section of the world’s largest employers expect about job trends and directions for the 2023—2027 period. This year’s report brings together the perspective of 803 companies – collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers – across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions. This report would not be possible without their openness to contributing their views and insights and we sincerely thank them all. We greatly appreciate, too, the support of our network of Partner Institutes, which have enhanced the report’s geographical coverage, and our ongoing data collaborations with Coursera, Indeed and LinkedIn, which complemented the survey findings with a range of unique and innovative data-driven insights. Our thanks also to the project team: Till Leopold, Elselot Hasselaar, Mark Rayner, Sam Grayling, Ricky Li and Attilio Di Battista, as well as the wider team at the Centre for the New Economy and Society for their input.

After widespread instability in the last three years across the world of work, we hope the outlook provided in this report will contribute to an ambitious multistakeholder agenda to better prepare workers, businesses, governments, educators and civil society for the disruptions and opportunities to come, and empower them to navigate these social, environmental and technological transitions. The time is ripe for business leaders and policy-makers to decisively shape these transformations and ensure that future investments translate into better jobs and opportunities for all.