What will our jobs look like in 15 years?

Between now and 2030, countries all over the world will have to create about 600 million jobs just to absorb the expanding working age population – while simultaneously coping with rapid technological change, unprecedented demographic changes, accelerating urbanization, climate change, and economic convergence obstacles.

Against this topsy-turvy backdrop, one of the biggest questions is what those jobs will look like. Or to put it another way, what combination of man and machine (or even robot or droid) might they be? Interestingly, some characterize this new era as “the new machine age” (MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson). Others call it “the human age” (the ManpowerGroup) – “the new capitalism that puts unprecedented value on talent as the driver of business success.” Still others call it “the age of ‘nearly human’ robots” – like PricewaterhouseCoopers, which reports that one major robotics company refers to its new-generation robot as an “intelligent industrial work assistant.”

To better inform this debate, the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Future of Jobs, in which I participate, is now launching a survey that will cover 2,000 firms (the largest 100 firms in each of the Group of 20 countries) to learn how they anticipate major trends will shape the labor market in their industry by 2020. For the World Bank Group, the results should help us better advise policy makers on the skills agenda, as well as the types of policies that they can adopt to enhance the odds of capturing the employment upsides and avoiding the worst of the likely downsides for their workers – especially the bottom 40% of income earners and vulnerable groups such as women and youth.

A Rapidly Shifting Economic and Social Changing Landscape

But before I go into more details on the survey, let’s take a step back and get a better fix on the changing economic and social picture.

First, the jobs challenge is daunting. Over the next 15 years, more than a billion young people will enter the labor market – on top of the 75 million currently unemployed. Keep in mind that for youth, the unemployment rate is three times higher than for adults. There is also the need to increase women’s participation in wage employment, boost productivity in the informal sector – which dominates in the developing world – and tackle employment in fragile and conflict-affected states, which will house 40% of the world’s poorest by 2030.

Second, technology is changing the nature of work itself. It allows for innovation and opens up new opportunities but it can also be disruptive – substituting for certain jobs, while enabling others to be more productive. The Silicon Valley take is that robots will free us all from the drudgery of work, and we should celebrate. And a World Economic Forum (WEF)-commissioned paper from McAffee predicts that China will become “one of the world’s biggest purchasers of robotic equipment.”  Already today, ATMs don’t just “give” us cash, they let us pay bills. Even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you can send and save money from a cell phone.  Satellite navigation has been helping us spend less time getting lost for years. And Amazon is already delivering parcels in some experimental sites by drones (unmanned aircraft).

Third, it’s unclear how economic convergence of the poorer countries with the richer countries will occur.  Lower-income countries used to look at East Asia’s stunning economic success and think they could copy the flying geese strategy – an international division of labor based on dynamic comparative advantage, moving seamlessly from light manufacturing, to industrialization, and then the nirvana of services.  But the goose-to-dragon path may be coming to an end, with some development experts pointing to premature de-industrialization in many low-income countries and limited opportunities to climb even the lowest rungs of international value chains. For example, Dani Rodrik suggests that the rapid catch-up through industrialization that played out well in East Asia (as well as other parts of the world) will figure much less prominently in the future. Rather, growth will have to typically come the hard way, meaning investing in skills and human capital and improving governance and institutions.

The Future of Jobs Survey

Against this backdrop, the WEF’s future of jobs survey will provide insights into debates over technological changes and jobs – and how the impact is likely to vary across sectors, countries, and types of firms. The questions center on the key trends that will affect how these leading firms do business, what the expected impacts will be on their own employment (including on gender composition), and how they are currently planning to adjust their employment practices in light of these anticipated changes.

Of the possible 15 or so trends cited in the questionnaire, about half refer to technology. Key ones include: (i) increased longevity and ageing societies; (ii) the “youth bulge” in emerging markets and its implications for the global talent pool; (iii) changing aspirations of women in the workforce; (iv) rebalancing of the global economy toward emerging markets; (v) climate change, natural resource constraints, and the transition to a green economy; (vi) increasing consumer awareness of privacy, food safety, ethical, and environmental concerns; (vii) changing work environments and flexible working arrangements (part-time, project-based); (viii) new business ecosystems, crowdsourcing, and peer-to-peer platforms.

The results of this questionnaire will feed into further work for our council on consolidating the latest knowledge on trends and disruptions to develop scenarios for skills and employment demand in the next 5-10 years, and identify implications of these projections for human capital planning and labor policy by governments, as well as for business and education providers.

Another important input in the global jobs debate will be the World Bank’s World Development Report 2016, which will examine how digital technologies can be a force for development, especially for the poor and vulnerable in developing economies. Clearly, it is more urgent than ever that the global community craft new approaches to job creation and skills development – and not just any jobs, but quality and productive ones that contribute to sustainable and inclusive growth.

This post first appeared on The World Bank Jobs & Development Blog. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum. 

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Author: Nigel Twose is a Senior Director at World Bank

Image: Workers on the assembly line replace the back covers of 32-inch television sets at Element Electronics in Winnsboro, South Carolina . REUTERS/Chris Keane