Employers globally anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23% of jobs in the next five years with an expected structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million jobs. This corresponds to a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023.

The Future of Jobs Report 2023 explores how jobs and skills will evolve over the next five years. The 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. 

On the 23% labour market churn, the report said this churn can be interpreted as an aggregate measure of disruption, constituting a mixture of emerging jobs added and declining jobs eliminated.

Respondents to the Report’s survey expect a higher-than-average churn in the Supply Chain and Transportation and Media, Entertainment and Sports industries, and lower-than-average churn in Manufacturing as well as Retail and Wholesale of Consumer Goods.

The Report also found that the largest job creation and destruction effects come from environmental, technology and economic trends. Among the macrotrends listed, businesses predict the strongest net job-creation effect to be driven by investments that facilitate the green transition of businesses, the broader application of ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) standards and supply chains becoming more localised, albeit with job growth offset by partial job displacement in each case.

Another key finding of the report showed that technology adoption will remain a key driver of business transformation in the next five years. Over 85% of organisations surveyed identify increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organization.

Within technology adoption, big data, cloud computing and AI feature highly on likelihood of adoption. More than 75% of companies are looking to adopt these technologies in the next five years. Digital platforms and apps are the technologies most likely to be adopted by the organisations surveyed, with 86% of companies expecting to incorporate them into their operations in the next five years.

The impact of most technologies on jobs is expected to be a net positive over the next five years. Big data analytics, climate change and environmental management technologies, and encryption and cybersecurity are expected to be the biggest drivers of job growth.

Meanwhile, organisations today estimate that 34% of all business-related tasks are performed by machines, with the remaining 66% performed by humans. This represents a small 1% increase in the level of automation that was estimated by respondents to the 2020 edition of the Future of Jobs Survey. This pace of automation contradicts expectations from 2020 survey respondents that almost half (47%) of business tasks would be automated in the following five years.

Employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Cognitive skills are reported to be growing in importance most quickly, reflecting the increasing importance of complex problem-solving in the workplace.

Respondents also express confidence in developing their existing workforce, however, they are less optimistic regarding the outlook for talent availability in the next five years.  Organisations identified skills gaps and an inability to attract talent as the key barriers preventing industry transformation. In response, 48% of companies identify improving talent progression and promotion processes as a key business practice that can increase the availability of talent to their organisation, ahead of offering higher wages (36%) and offering effective reskilling and upskilling (34%).

Nearly half, or 45% of businesses see funding for skills training as an effective intervention available to governments seeking to connect talent to employment. Funding for skills training ranks ahead of flexibility on hiring and firing practices (33%), tax and other incentives for companies to improve wages (33%), improvements to school systems (31%) and changes to immigration laws on foreign talent (28%).

The report also showed that the majority of companies will prioritise women (79%), youth under 25 (68%) and those with disabilities (51%) as part of their DEI programmes.