The fastest-declining jobs between now and 2027 - report

• With companies looking to adopt technologies, such as AI, cloud computing and big data, the impact on the relevance of certain jobs hangs in the balance.
• By 2027, six in 10 workers will need training to keep up with this rapid transformation.
• This is according to the World Economic Forum's latest Future of Jobs report.
• For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage. 

With more than 75% of companies globally looking to adopt technologies, such as AI, cloud computing and big data in the next five years, the impact on the relevance of certain jobs - for the near future - hangs in the balance.

This is according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2023 Future of Jobs report, which surveyed 803 companies that collectively employ 11.3 million workers across 27 industries and 45 economies from all regions of the world.

Its insights feature the widest coverage the WEF has had, so far, by topic, geography and sector.

"While expectations of the work displacement of physical and manual work by machines has decreased, reasoning, communication and coordinating – all traits with a comparative advantage for humans – are expected to be more automatable in the future," the report said.

"Artificial intelligence, a key driver of potential algorithmic displacement, is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies and is expected to lead to high churn – with 50% of organisations expecting it to create job growth and 25% expecting it to create job losses."

Fastest declining roles

The report states that the decline of certain roles between now and 2027 will happen as a result of technology and digitalisation. The surveyed organisations predicted that there would be 26 million fewer jobs by 2027.

By 2027, six in 10 workers will need training to keep up with this rapid transformation, but the report said that only half of workers are seen to have access to relevant and sufficient training opportunities today.

"The highest priority for skills training from 2023 to 2027 is analytical thinking, which is set to account for 10% of training initiatives, on average," it said.

The second priority is creative thinking, and the third is training workers to use AI and big data. Even as that's the case, many employees across age ranges said that they were not satisfied with training opportunities from their respective organisations.

"57% of employees are pursuing training outside of work, because company training programmes do not teach them relevant skills, advance their career development or help them stay competitive in the labour market," the report said, adding that some felt companies focused its training efforts mainly on managers' development and skills.

Fastest-growing roles       

The fastest-growing roles today are driven by three key factors: technology, digitalisation and sustainability. These include roles such as AI and machine learning specialists – which are considered the top fastest-growing jobs right now – and sustainability specialists, business intelligence analysts and information security analysts, according to the report.

With regard to sustainability, jobs such as renewable energy engineers, solar energy installation practitioners and system engineers are the fastest growing roles as much of the world works to transition toward renewable energy.

While jobs in education, agriculture and digital commerce might not necessarily be the fastest-growing, they're also expected to see large-scale growth in the upcoming five years.

"It remains to be seen how technologies going through the most rapid changes, such as generative AI technology, may further change the make-up of automatable tasks over the 2023–2027 period."