COVID, tech advances could disrupt 85 million jobs by 2025: WEF

The coronavirus pandemic has deepened inequalities across labour markets and accelerated the urgency with which the public and private sectors must act to ensure millions of people remain employable in a changing jobs market, the World Economic Forum (WEF) stressed on Tuesday.

Within the next five years, automation and a new division of labour between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs around the world, WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2020 found. Remote work is here to stay and going forward, workers should expect to change careers and hone skills multiple times throughout their careers to adapt to new labour trends.

“COVID-19 has accelerated the arrival of the future of work,” Saadia Zahidi, WEF’s managing director, said in a news release. “It’s a double disruption scenario that presents another hurdle for workers in this difficult time. The window of opportunity for proactive management of this change is closing fast.”

WEF’s report found that the pace of technological adoption is expected to remain unabated during the next five years with the continued adoption of cloud computing, big data and e-commerce. The pandemic-induced economic crisis has only accelerated the process and continued to clobber entire sectors on a far worse level than the 2008 global financial crisis.

With most business leaders focused on fast-tracking digitalisation, keeping up with the changes will require workers to be retrained. Even workers who are expected to remain in their jobs for the next five years will need to adapt, the report found, with nearly 50 percent expected to require re-skilling.

The Future of Jobs survey, which informs the WEF report, is based on the projections of senior business leaders from some 300 global firms, which together employ eight million workers.