WEF report says not technology, but THESE factors threaten your jobs

While for the long term the obvious AI takeover and digitisation has been cited as reason, in the short term, the report, in contrary to popular belief has cited macroeconomic factors like slower economic growth, supply shortages and inflation as the threat to labour prospects. 

The WEF said that macro trends, including the green transition, ESG standards and localisation of supply chains are the leading drivers of job growth globally, with economic challenges, including high inflation, slower economic growth and supply shortages, posing the greatest threat.

With massive layoffs as a part of cost cutting, job growth has failed to see much progress thereby also influencing a labour shortage. Analysts have predicted these factors will continue to plagues industries in the near future. 

The WEF report has stressed on the need to ‘increasing urgency for re-skilling revolution’, while estimating that 44% of an individual worker’s skills will need to be updated for sustained employability.

According to the WEF’s Future of Jobs report, globally, the job market churn is estimated at 23 per cent, with 69 million new jobs expected to be created and 83 million eliminated by 2027. 

The macroeconomic causes draws attention to the need to upgrade skills as massive layoffs trends, in the post pandemic era which in its early periods was plagued by the ‘great resignation’. 

The report by WEF implied that impending growth slump, will stifle job creation in the medium term, along with the less-than-required pace in improving skill sets to meet the employers’ needs. 

According to the estimates of the 803 companies surveyed for the report, employers anticipate 69 million new jobs to be created and 83 million eliminated among the 673 million jobs corresponding to the dataset, a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2 per cent of current employment.

Attributing threat and opportunity from technology and digitisation to the labour market, WEF found that the fastest-growing roles are being driven by technology and digitalisation. 

Big data ranks at the top among technologies seen to create jobs. The employment of data analysts and scientists, big data specialists, AI machine learning specialists and cybersecurity professionals is expected to grow on average by 30 per cent by 2027.

At the same time, the fastest declining roles are also being driven by technology and digitalisation, with clerical or secretarial roles, including bank tellers, cashiers and data entry clerks expected to decline fastest.

(With inputs from agencies)