World Economic Forum Report Sees Labour Market Disruption In Five Years

The World Economic Forum (WEF), which has its annual meeting underway in Davos, Switzerland, released its new report on the future of jobs, forecasting that widespread disruption to business models and labour markets can be expected over the next five years.

The authors attribute this to the world being in the middle of a new "fourth" industrial revolution, which includes developments in previously disjointed fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and genetics and biotechnology.

To keep up the changes, the report finds that there may be an "enormous change in the skill set needed to thrive in the new language".

The report is based on responses from chief human resources officers representing "more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas" on how they imagine jobs in their industry will change up to the year 2020.

According to popular estimates, 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don't yet exist. The authors concede that this shift while creating new jobs, could create problems of unemployment because of the possibility of a lopsided job creation in new segments as compared to massive declines in other existing industries.

7.1 Million Jobs At Stake
Current trends could lead to a net employment impact of more that 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labour market changes, says the report. It further predicts that a total of 7.1 million jobs are at stake out of which, two-thirds are concentrated in white-collar office and administrative roles.

Compared to this, only 2 million jobs are expected to be created in computer, mathematical, architectural and engineering related fields. Manufacturing and production are like to further decline, but "re also anticipated to have a relatively good potential for upskilling, redeployment and productivity enhancement through technology rather than pure substitution."

The key technologic spaces which will drive the changes in the employment space are mobile internet cloud technology, big data, new energy, internet of things and sharing economy, crowdsourcing.

While mobile is making the biggest impact currently, over the next two years big data is expected to have an equally disruptive impact and from 2018 to 2020 internet of things is expect to lead while other leaders may slow down.

The report emphasises that to avoid massive unemployment an immediate focus on creating a talent revolution needs to take place "for which governments and businesses will need to profoundly change their approach to education, skills and employment and their approach to working with each other".