The World Economic Forum’s annual Future of Jobs Report 2023 explores how jobs and skills will evolve over the next five years. This fourth edition of the series continues the analysis of employer expectations to provide new insights on how socio-economic and technology trends will shape the workplace of the future.
Since its first edition in 2016, the World Economic Forum’s bi-annual Future of Jobs Report has tracked the labour-market impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, identifying the potential scale of occupational disruption and growth alongside strategies for empowering job transitions from declining to emerging roles.
In 2023, labour-market transformations driven by technological breakthroughs, such as the coming of age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), are being compounded by economic and geopolitical disruptions and growing social and environmental pressures. This fourth edition of the Future of Jobs Report therefore broadens its scope beyond technological change to also consider and address the labour-market impact of a multitude of concurrent trends, including the green and energy transitions, macroeconomic factors, and geoeconomic and supply-chain shifts.
Similar to previous editions, the core of the 2023 Future of Jobs Report is based on a unique surveybased data set covering the expectations of a wide cross-section of the world’s largest employers related to job trends and directions for the 2023— 2027 period. This year’s report brings together the perspectives of 803 companies – collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers – across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions. This report would not be possible without their openness to contributing their views and insights, and we sincerely thank them all. We greatly appreciate, too, the support of our network of Partner Institutes, which have enhanced the report’s geographical coverage, and our ongoing data collaborations with Coursera, Indeed and LinkedIn, which complemented the survey findings with a range of unique and innovative data-driven insights. Our thanks also to the project team: Till Leopold, Elselot Hasselaar, Mark Rayner, Sam Grayling, Ricky Li and Attilio Di Battista, as well as the wider team at the Centre for the New Economy and Society for their input.
After widespread instability in the last three years across the world of work, we hope the outlook provided in this report will contribute to an ambitious multistakeholder agenda to better prepare workers, businesses, governments, educators and civil society for the disruptions and opportunities to come, and empower them to navigate these social, environmental and technological transitions. The time is ripe for business leaders and policy-makers to decisively shape these transformations and ensure that future investments translate into better jobs and opportunities for all.