The future of work has raised many questions. Where will we work? How will our day to day jobs change and who will be in charge?
One thing is for sure the labour market is definitely going to evolve in the coming years and new research has put that into sharp context.
A new report from the organisers of the Davos economic forum has stated that more than half of all workplace tasks will be carried out by machines by 2025.
The World Economic Forum estimates that machines will be responsible for a massive 52% of labour in the next seven years, up from just 29% today.
How will these changed affect workers? Well, the report states that roughly 75 million jobs worldwide will be lost by 2022.
But it’s not all doom and gloom because some of these losses will be offset by the creation of 133 million new jobs.
However, workers will face challenges as they may need to retrain and upskill in order to remain employable.
“By 2025, the majority of workplace tasks in existence today will be performed by machines or algorithms. At the same time a greater number of new jobs will be created,” said Saadia Zahidi, a WEF board member. “Our research suggests that neither businesses nor governments have fully grasped the size of this key challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
The established roles that are about to experience increased demand between now and 2022 are data analysts and scientists, software and applications developers and e-commerce and social media specialists.
Other roles expected to grow are those that focus on interpersonal skills such as customer service workers and sales and marketing professionals.
The report was based on a study of executives and specialists representing 15 million employees across 12 industries.
