Future Of Jobs

Global labour markets are undergoing major transformations with the rapidly shifting frontier between the work tasks performed by humans and those performed by machines and algorithms. These transformations, could either lead to a new age of good work, good jobs and improved quality of life for all; or pose the risk of widening skills gaps, greater inequality and broader polarization.

A report from World Economic Forum suggests that business leaders across all industries and regions will increasingly be called upon to formulate a comprehensive workforce strategy ready to meet the challenges of this new era of accelerating change and innovation.

According to the report titled ‘Future Of Jobs’, robot adoption rates diverge significantly across sectors, with 37 percent to 23 percent of companies planning this investment, depending on the industry. Companies across all sectors are most likely to adopt the use of stationary robots, in contrast to humanoid, aerial or underwater robots.

The report estimates that robots will displace 75 million jobs globally by 2022, while 133 million additional new roles may emerge concurrently, with a positive outlook. These projections, however, are for roles in large multinationals, and there is no guarantee of jobs being replaced.

When determining job location decisions, companies overwhelmingly prioritize the availability of skilled local talent as their foremost consideration, with 74 percent of respondents providing this factor as their key consideration. In contrast, 64 percent of companies cite labour costs as their main concern. A range of additional relevant factors—such as the flexibility of local labour laws, industry agglomeration effects or proximity of raw materials—were considered of lower importance.

Nearly 50 percent of companies expect that automation will lead to some reduction in their full-time workforce by 2022, based on the job profiles of their employee base today. However, 38 percent of businesses expect to extend their workforce to new productivity-enhancing roles, and more than a quarter expect automation to lead to the creation of new roles in their enterprise.

Companies expect a significant shift on the frontier between humans and machines when it comes to existing work tasks between 2018 and 2022. In 2018, an average of 71 percent of total task hours is performed by humans, compared to 29 percent by machines. By 2022 this average is expected to have shifted to 58 percent task hours performed by humans and 42 percent by machines.

In 2018, in terms of total working hours, no work task was yet estimated to be predominantly performed by a machine or an algorithm. By 2022, this picture is projected to have somewhat changed, with machines and algorithms on an average would have increased their contribution to specific tasks by 57 percent.