The year 2025 unfolds amid ongoing transformations in global labour markets. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, rising cost of living, geopolitical conflicts, the climate emergency and economic downturns have added further turbulence to technology-driven global employment changes. While the global economic outlook appears to be stabilizing, it does so amid weaker global growth projections of 3.2% for 2025.1 Global inflation appears to have eased and is now projected to reach 3.5% by the end of 2025 – below the average global rate of the first two decades of the 21st century. However, living costs remain elevated around the world.

Aided by a stabilizing economic outlook and easing inflation, the global unemployment rate, at 4.9%,2 stands at the lowest level since 1991. However, this headline figure hides a range of disparities. While middle-income countries are experiencing reductions in unemployment, low-income countries have seen an increase, from 5.1% in 2022 to 5.3% by 2024.

Reductions in unemployment have also lagged for women. Since 2020, when the global unemployment rate peaked for both sexes at 6.6%, the rate for men has declined to 4.8%, while the rate for women remains elevated at 5.2%. This trend is driven mainly by lower-middle income countries, where the female unemployment rate (of 5.5%) is 1.1% higher than the male equivalent. High-income countries have an unemployment rate gender disparity of 0.4%; however, this disparity has existed for over a decade – rather than opening up during the post-COVID recovery. For low- income and upper-middle income countries, male and female unemployment rates remain even.

Youth unemployment rates tell another story of labour-market health. While the global youth unemployment rate has tracked the total global unemployment rate, it remains elevated at 13%. Assessing rates of youth not in employment education or training (NEETs) highlights disparities between economies at different national income levels. While the global NEET rate remains flat at 21.7%, it stands at just 10.1% for high-income economies, rising to 17.3% for upper-middle income ones. The rate then jumps to 25.9% for lower-middle income economies and 27.6% for low-income ones.

The jobs gap – a measure by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to incorporate a broader understanding of unemployment and underemployment – adds additional nuance to our understanding of the labour-market situation. Similarly to global headline unemployment, the jobs gap has been decreasing and stood at a need for 402 million additional jobs in 2024. While most of the world has experienced this downward trend, low-income economies saw their jobs gap increase by 0.4 percentage points compared to pre- pandemic levels. Lower-middle income economies saw the largest reduction in the jobs gap (by 2 percentage points compared to 2019 levels). Across all country income groups, the jobs gap for women is higher than that for men, but gender differences are most pronounced in low-income and especially lower-income economies, where the jobs gap for women surpasses that of men by 7.5 percentage points.

The global labour-force participation rate has rebounded after a drop during the pandemic and now stands at similar levels to 2019 for all income groups except lower-middle income economies. In lower-income economies the labour-force participation rate has spiked beyond the levels seen in 2019. This is noteworthy considering lower- middle income economies – who make up around 40% of the global population – will drive the bulk of working-age population growth in the coming years and decades. The combination of growing working- age populations and labour-force participation rates emphasizes the importance of job creation in these economies.

Against the backdrop of this current labour-market landscape, the Future of Jobs Report 2025 analyses how organizations expect the labour market to evolve over the next five years until 2030. Like previous editions of the report, this analysis is based on the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey, conducted in late 2024, which brings together the perspectives of more than 1,000 global employers, collectively employing more than 14.1 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. The survey highlights how macrotrends and technology will influence industry transformation and employment, the jobs and skills outlook over the next five years and the corresponding workforce transformation strategies companies plan to use to address these issues.

The report begins by outlining five macrotrends impacting the labour market – technological change, the green transition, geoeconomic fragmentation, economic uncertainty and demographic shifts. In Chapter 2, the report discusses how organizations expect jobs to evolve, including which jobs are predicted to grow and decline fastest, and the trends driving these changes. Chapter 3 looks at projected changes to the skills needed in the labour market, before Chapter 4 analyses the workforce practices that employers plan to adopt in their organizations. Finally, Chapter 5 provides insights for the nine regions, 55 economies, and 22 industry clusters that meet the report’s statistical thresholds for standalone analysis. The appendix provides a detailed overview of the report’s survey and analysis methodology.

In addition, the Future of Jobs Report 2025 features a comprehensive set of Region, Economy and Industry Profiles. User guides are provided for each of these profiles to support their use as practical, standalone tools.