The top jobs and labour market stories of 2025

The global labour market enters 2026 in a state of paradox.

While unemployment rates remain historically low across many developed economies – the OECD reported a stable 4.9% rate in April 2025, marking three consecutive years at or below 5% – wage growth patterns reveal stark regional differences, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping job opportunities across skill levels.

In September, we highlighted the uneven landscape of global wages and employment: Brazil recorded record-high wages, while Japan experienced a sixth consecutive month of real wage declines despite maintaining ultra-low unemployment at 2.5%. In the UK, hiring slowed even as wages rose 5% annually. Meanwhile, South Africa saw unemployment reach 32.9%.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 revealed a workforce in transition. Here are some key takeaways that have defined this year:

In 2025, the labour market faced growing concerns at the entry-level, with opportunities shrinking just as workforce participation from younger generations peaked.

Since January 2024, entry-level job postings have fallen by 29%, according to Randstad’s analysis of 126 million postings worldwide. What was once a temporary slowdown now looks increasingly structural. Here’s a snapshot of the figures worldwide:

In the United States, youth unemployment reached 10.8% in July, more than double the overall 4.3% rate. Across Asia and Africa, the figures are even more alarming – 17% in India, 16.5% in China, and around 36% in Morocco. In the UK, 1.2 million graduates competed for just under 17,000 entry-level positions in 2024.

This isn't just caused by AI-driven automation. Economists attribute the slowdown to broader structural forces: corporate caution in a cooling economy, trade-related uncertainty and a hiring freeze that has become the defining feature of what Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell termed a "low-hiring, low-firing" economy.

In the face of this, young people are diversifying income streams and embracing apprenticeships and vocational training, with 37% of Gen Z graduates now pursuing or employed in blue-collar work.

AI agents are moving quickly from pilot projects to real-world deployment.

According to the Forum’s AI Agents in Action: Foundations for Evaluation and Governance report, 82% of executives plan to adopt them within the next one to three years. However, this experimentation is currently accelerating faster than the oversight needed to manage the autonomy, safety, system integration and trust.

An IBM survey of 1000 AI developers found that 99% are exploring or developing AI agents, and as organizations adopt AI agents to augment teams or act in the physical world, onboarding these needs to be done in the same way as with an employee.

AI agents are already changing how everyday business work gets done. Research from Jobs of Tomorrow: Technology and the Future of the World’s Largest Workforces shows that the technology has particular potential in business and management functions, where systems now combine image recognition and data processing to automate routine tasks such as invoices, payments, onboarding and client data entry.

As we look to 2026, the long-term success of AI agent adoption and use depends on building systems that remain understandable, reliable and accountable.

As AI accelerates automation, many organizations are finding themselves with excess capacity in traditional roles, even as shortages deepen in AI-critical skills.

A global survey of C-suite executives found that nine out of 10 leaders report workforce overcapacity of up to 20% in legacy roles, along with shortages in AI skills.

Recent research by Cognizant and the Forum reveals that demand for digital skills, such as AI, big data and technology literacy, is accelerating far more quickly than global supply. In fact, 94% of leaders face AI-critical skill shortages today, with one in three reporting gaps of 40% or more.

Reskilling and upskilling, redesigning roles around human-AI collaboration, embedding workforce planning into strategy cycles and leveraging the full spectrum of HR levers are listed as four critical ways for leaders to navigate the skills paradox.

LinkedIn's analysis of upskilling trends reveals that workers are also taking control of their own development, with the proportion of workers with AI skills having increased by at least 100% across all sectors since 2016. In 2025, the most in-demand skills have shifted dramatically towards AI literacy, data analysis, and human-centric competencies.

This skills transition also presents an opportunity to close persistent gender gaps. Currently, women make up just 28% of the global STEM workforce and 22% of AI professionals, despite evidence that more gender-diverse teams are more innovative and financially resilient.

Armed conflicts and geopolitical tensions have reshaped global labour supply and demand in ways that will reverberate for years.

The Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 identified conflict-driven displacement as a defining challenge of our time. In June 2025, the UNHCR reported that over 122 million people globally are currently displaced due to conflict and persecution, placing unprecedented pressure on humanitarian organizations operating in fragile contexts.

At the same time, funding constraints are undermining the sector’s ability to respond. Proposed US funding cuts to international humanitarian organizations have triggered a jobs crisis in the aid sector itself. The International Labour Organization faces proposed funding reductions of $107 million, requiring staff cuts and potentially limiting the agency's ability to respond to challenges in developing economies.

These pressures are not confined to humanitarian systems. Geoeconomic fragmentation and geopolitical tensions are increasingly shaping how companies operate, invest and hire. According to The Future of Jobs Report 2025, one-third of surveyed organizations expect these forces to drive business model transformation over the next five years.