Data may be king when it comes to future job growth, but human input will remain as relevant as ever in our changing world.
At a webinar to explore the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, released last month, the Ai Group Centre for Education and Training (Ai Group CET) shared how Australia's labour market will evolve over the next five years.
The report brings together the perspective of more than 1000 employers who collectively represent more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies from around the world.
The Ai Group CET was the Australian survey partner.
The report identifies five key labour trends and explores how they impact the job landscape. They include:
The World Economic Forum projects 7 per cent of total employment will grow in the next five years, accounting for 78 million jobs globally.
“Breaking down this figure, 92 million jobs are going to be displaced, which accounts for 8 per cent of today's employment, while 14 per cent of today's employment will be created, meaning 170 million additional jobs being increased in the next five years,” report author Ricky Li said.
Ai Group CET Executive Director Caroline Smith said: “It proves that building the capability and size of Australia's workforce now and in the coming years has never been more critical.”
Technological change is expected to drive the biggest job growth, as well as driving the biggest job decline.
Demographic shifts and the green transition are creating more jobs than destroying them.
The trend is the same for geoeconomic fragmentation, but the relative volume of job change is smaller.
When it comes to economic uncertainty, trends such as the rising cost of living and slow economic growth create specific jobs while retiring some existing jobs.
“When people talk about the future of jobs, they usually focus on tech-related roles,” Ms Li said.
“However, when it comes to the volume of job growth in the next five years, it’s the jobs that constitute the day-to-day economy that are growing the largest, such as farm workers, caretakers and teachers.”
The jobs declining most rapidly include clerical workers and secretaries.
The fastest growing jobs in terms of percentage change include big-data specialists, fintech engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, software developers and security management specialists.
Some of the green transition-related roles which entered the top fastest-growing jobs this year include autonomous EV specialists, environmental engineers and renewable energy engineers.
Postal service clerks and bank tellers are among the fastest declining jobs in the next five years.
Workers expect two-fifths of their existing skill sets will be disrupted and transformed by 2030, highlighting the importance of investing in reskilling and upskilling.
The core skills in 2025 are a mix of social-emotional, self-efficacy and technology skills.
Analytical thinking continues to be the top core skill, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility then leadership and social influence skills.
The fastest growing skills by 2030 include technology and big data; social, emotional and green skills and creative thinking and resilience.
Environmental stewardship entered the top 10 list for the first time in the survey’s history.
With skills gaps the biggest barrier to business transformation, upskilling is the top workforce strategy organisations plan to implement in the next five years.
Seven in 10 executives plan to hire staff with new skills, while four in 10 say they will reduce the number of employees whose skills become less relevant.
Globally, the public policies most welcomed by executives relate to strengthening talent pipelines: funding and providing reskilling and upskilling programs and improving public education systems.
“History tells us more jobs are created than lost, and this report backs up that hypothesis — that we will see more jobs created as a result of the changes we're going through,” Ai Group Chief Executive and webinar panellist Innes Willox said.
“That's a very positive outcome at a time when there is understandably a lot of concern and uncertainty around what this technological change we're going through will bring.
“The second major takeout of the report is that any job with the word data in it, except ‘clerk’, is going to be highly sought after by business.
“We’re going into this ‘intelligence age’ where data is king.
“Jobs with a big emphasis on being able to assemble, assess, analyse and then have clear takeouts from data will be more in demand than ever.
“While process-driven data jobs such as accounting, bookkeeping and payroll will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), there has to remain a human element to understand how to assess this data and apply it.”
“Relative to other technologies, Australians are slower on the take-up of artificial intelligence than counterparts in other markets, which is unusual because traditionally, we've been very fast adopters of technology,” Mr Willox said.
“Business wants some certainty around how the future of digitalisation is going to be regulated.
“Ai Group sits on several Federal Government AI advisory groups working through issues to put guardrails in place.
“We have voluntary codes, but there's still uncertainty around how they will work.”
Ai Group Head of Industry Development and Policy Louise McGrath added: “People are nervous about investing in AI without some certainty on what that regulation is and how far down the supply chain it will apply.
“However, a board should focus on both strategy and risk. Unfortunately, a lot of time is spent on risk, which suppresses investment where it matters.”
An Ai Group report, Technology Adoption in Australian Industry, published last year, revealed many companies passively adopt AI, such as Google maps in drivers’ cars.
“A lot of businesses are using AI but not quite realising it,” Mr Willox said.
“As that awareness grows, they will adopt it more and more.
“The question the report raises is how will those soft skills of knowledge, expertise and empathy play a role in the final decision-making process?
“How do we develop that knowledge, expertise and empathy for generations to come when those skills will be even more in demand?
“And, crucially, how do we start developing that now if AI is taking away some of those entry-level jobs that a lot of people get their foothold into the workplace with?”
Ms McGrath added: “Businesses do businesses with people, so as much as data can be used to understand sales, trends and product, ultimately you need a human with those transferable skills of understanding context and building relationships.
“That will never go away.”
CLICK HERE to access the full report and snapshots of the global datasets.
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Wendy Larter is Communications Manager at the Australian Industry Group. She has more than 20 years’ experience as a reporter, features writer, contributor and sub-editor for newspapers and magazines including The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Metro, the News of the World, The Times and Elle in the UK.
