SINGAPORE - Millions of jobs will be wiped out by 2027 and the rate of creation of new jobs will be far lower than those eliminated.

This was the grim conclusion of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Future of Jobs Report 2023, released on Monday. It comes amid concerns of a looming economic recession and persistent inflation.

Nearly a quarter of jobs will change by 2027, with about 69 million new jobs being created and 83 million to be eliminated, it said. This would mean a net decrease of 14 million jobs or 2 per cent of current employment.

Increasing digitalisation, adoption of new technologies, transition to a green economy, localisation of supply chains and slower economic growth are driving the change.

The findings are based on a survey of 803 companies that employ 11.3 million people in 45 economies around the world.

The most-in-demand jobs at the moment for the coming years are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning specialists, sustainability specialists, business intelligence analysts and information security specialists.

Jobs that will decline the fastest include clerical or secretarial roles, among them those of bank tellers, cashiers and data entry clerks.

“The human-machine frontier is shifting to a new terrain,” said Ms Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the WEF, acknowledging that technology is creating the structural churn.

“While expectations of the displacement of physical and manual work by machines have decreased, tasks requiring reasoning, communicating and coordinating – all traits with a comparative advantage for humans – are expected to be more automatable in the future,” she noted in an op-ed to mark the release of the report.

Generative AI is expected to be adopted by nearly 75 per cent of surveyed companies, and will be second only to humanoid and industrial robots in terms of inflicting job losses, she said.

The WEF’s report points out that the employment of data analysts and scientists, big data specialists, AI machine learning specialists and cyber-security professionals is expected to grow on average by 30 per cent by 2027.

Concurring with the report’s findings, LinkedIn’s Ms Suzanne Duke, who heads the global public policy and economic graph team at the firm, said “digital and green” jobs have been the most in-demand in recent years.

There has been a 50 per cent surge in jobs mentioning GPT in the past 12 months, she said during a virtual briefing session by the WEF on the report’s findings on Tuesday. GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a language model system that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

Ms Zahidi and Ms Duke agreed that the emphasis on green jobs is bound to grow.

“Roles from renewable energy engineers, solar energy installation and systems engineers to sustainability specialists and environmental protection professionals will be in high demand, translating to growth of approximately one million jobs,” Ms Zahidi said in her op-ed.

The WEF’s report, however, said that the largest absolute gains in jobs will be in the education and agriculture sectors.

Jobs in the education industry are expected to grow by about 10 per cent, leading to three million additional jobs for vocational and higher education teachers.

Jobs for agricultural professionals will see a 15 per cent to 30 per cent increase, leading to an additional four million jobs.

While disruption will be across the globe, the “new economic geography created by shifting supply chains and a greater focus on resilience over efficiency is expected to create net job growth, with wins for economies in Asia and the Middle East especially”, said Ms Zahidi.

In terms of skills upgrades, the Jobs Report estimates that on average, 44 per cent of an individual worker’s skills will need to be updated.

Strong cognitive skills are increasingly valued by employers, reflecting the growing importance of complex problem-solving in the workplace, said the report.

Analytical thinking and creative thinking will be the most valued skills in 2023, and remain so for the next five years.

Faster reskilling will be necessary, said Mr Shravan Goli, chief operating officer at Coursera, an open online course provider at the virtual briefing.

The company’s research showed that individuals without degrees could acquire critical skills in a similar timeframe to those with degrees.

Given this reality, companies could opt for more skills-based hiring to tackle skills gaps and talent shortages, he said.

Top 10 fastest growing jobs*

1. AI and Machine Learning Specialists

2. Sustainability Specialists

3. Business Intelligence Analysts

4. Information Security Analysts

5. Fintech Engineers

6. Data Analysts and Scientists

7. Robotics Engineers

8. Big Data Specialists

9. Agricultural Equipment Operators

10. Digital Transformation Specialists

*The jobs that survey respondents expect will grow most quickly from 2023 to 2027, as a fraction of present employment figures.

Top 10 skills of 2023**

1. Analytical thinking

2. Creative thinking

3. Resilience, flexibility and agility

4. Motivation and self-awareness

5. Curiosity and lifelong learning

6. Technological literacy

7. Dependability and attention to detail

8. Empathy and active listening

9. Leadership and social influence

10. Quality control

**The skills judged to be of greatest importance to workers at the time of survey.

• Source: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2023