From the global economy to the gig economy, and from the rise of Asia to the skills shortage, Staffing Industry Analysts released a new report that takes a high-level view of eight trends affecting the staffing industry in 2018.

Here’s a brief look at eight trends affecting staffing this year. The full report, “Staffing Trends in 2018,” is available to corporate members of SIA.

The global economy is doing OK: Generally, staffing industry revenue growth is highly correlated with GDP growth; the stronger the economy, the stronger the staffing market. The International Monetary Fund currently pegs global GDP at 3.7% in 2018. Growth in Asia has been faster in prior years; nevertheless, it is encouraging that many developed economies, including the US, are forecast to grow above 2%.

Technology/automation: New technology will radically change the skill profile of jobs, and staffing firms will be challenged to keep pace as the technology revolution sweeps through their client base. And even if automation ends up creating more jobs than it destroys, in the future our education systems may fail to match the demand for workers with the right qualifications for these newer jobs, leaving staffing firms struggling to find talent in increasingly tighter labor markets. On the bright side, staffing firms will benefit from new, more sophisticated and less-expensive technologies that have the potential to improve their services and lower their costs.

Skills shortages: At a time when developed economies need extra headcount, the prevailing public and political zeitgeist is more focused on creating barriers to foreign workers than attracting them. For staffing firms, these negative trends should turn out to be positive. While sourcing talent may become much harder for everyone, employers have always had other options when looking for permanent and temporary workers than using a staffing firm. If these alternative methods no longer work as well as they have in the past, then their reliance on staffing firms should increase. As long as staffing firms can continue to be more expert at finding talent than their clients, then they can have an increasingly important role to play.

Legislation: Legislative change is a common occurrence in the staffing industry and, while this can sometimes be negative, it often moves in a positive direction, especially in emerging markets where a proper legal framework is still in the process of being developed.

Gig economy: In 2017, a number of large staffing firms started to invest in their own online staffing capability either by acquisition or organically such as Adecco’s launch of its online initiatives Adia and YOSS, and Trueblue’s Jobstack. In addition, a new wave of technology providers have built online staffing enabling technology as standalone solutions, allowing staffing companies to provide human cloud technology without having to develop such technology themselves. In 2018, SIA expects to see more adoption of online staffing enabling technology and further acquisitions as the lines between staffing firms and online staffing platforms become increasingly blurred.

Public perception: Worldwide media has been much more focused on contingent work since the advent of online staffing platforms and online work services such as Uber. The rights and wrongs of so-called “precarious work” is a common narrative in newspaper articles discussing the gig economy with most of the focus on “the wrongs.” This negative news flow is likely to continue in 2018 given upcoming legal challenges to worker status in the courts, mostly targeting the better-known gig economy brands. Legislation in most jurisdictions is still out-of-step with these new business models and, if 2017 is anything to go by, decisions over whether such workers are employed or self-employed will continue to be both confused and contradictory.

Procurement sophistication: There has been a gradual evolution over the past 20 years for contingent workforce managers to adopt increasingly complex programs starting with preferred supplier lists to master vendor programs and MSP. Most would acknowledge that total talent is the next stage of that evolution and suppliers and buyers are being challenged to come up with more proactive and holistic methods to effectively deal with all categories of employed and nonemployed labor.

Rise of Asia: Asian staffing markets are among the fastest-growing globally and three countries now rank among the largest 15 staffing markets globally. SIA’s research puts the large Japanese staffing market on a growth trajectory of 7% while China is forecast to grow by 16% and India by 10%.

SIA corporate members can download the full report online.