World Economic Forum
The Future of Jobs Report 2018
The World Economic Forum’s Centre for the New Economy and Society provides a platform for leaders to understand current socio-economic transformations and shape a future in which people are at the heart of economic growth and social progress. A significant portion of their activities aim to support leaders in managing the future of work. This biannual report provides a five-year outlook based on the latest thinking inside companies and is designed to inform other businesses, governments and workers in their decision-making. Additionally the Centre is working across multiple industries to design sector-level roadmaps to respond to the new opportunities and challenges of managing workforce transitions
Executive Summary
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socio-economic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labour markets. New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others. The skill sets required in both old and new occupations will change in most industries and transform how and where people work. It may also affect female and male workers differently and transform the dynamics of the industry gender gap.
The Future of Jobs Report aims to unpack and provide specific information on the relative magnitude of these trends by industry and geography, and on the expected time horizon for their impact to be felt on job functions, employment levels and skills.
Report Highlights
“The rise of workplace automation in its many forms has the potential to vastly improve productivity and augment the work of human employees. Automation technology can help remove the burden of repetitive administrative work and enable employees to focus on solving more complex issues while reducing the risk of error, allowing them to focus on value-added tasks. Examples of now well-established and almost unremarkable automation-based augmentation technology that hardly existed 25 years ago range from computer- aided design and modelling software used by architects, engineers and designers, to robotic medical tools used by doctors and surgeons, through to search engine technology that allows researchers to find more relevant information. In theory, these technologies take away tasks from workers, but in practice their overall effect is to vastly amplify and augment their abilities.”
Additional Resources
- World Economic Forum Website
- Future of Jobs Report
- World Economic Forum Facebook
- World Economic Forum Twitter
The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.
The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.
It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.
