Jobs of Tomorrow: Mapping Opportunity in the New Economy

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating demand for millions of new jobs, with vast new opportunities for fulfill-ing people’s potential and aspirations. However, in order to turn these opportunities into reality, new sources of data and innovative approaches to understand emerging jobs and skills, as well as to empower effective and coordinated large-scale action are urgently needed across the globe. This report, Jobs of Tomorrow: Mapping Opportunity in the New Economy, takes an in-depth look into the ‘black box’ of new job creation, reviewing the shifting focus of employment to emerging professions of the future, the reasons behind it and what skills will be required by these professions. The analysis presented in this report is based on inno-vative metrics authored in partnership between the World Economic Forum’s New Metrics CoLab in its Platform for the New Economy and Society, and data scientists at three part-ner companies: Burning Glass Technologies, Coursera and LinkedIn. Through these collaborations, the report provides insights into emerging opportunities for employment across the global economy as well as unique detail regarding the skill sets needed to leverage those opportunities.Key findings include:≥Demand for both “digital” and “human” factors is driving growth in the professions of the future. Seven key professional clusters are emerging in tandem. On the one hand, these reflect the adoption of new technologies—giving rise to greater demand for green economy jobs, roles at the forefront of the data and AI economy as well as new roles in engineering, cloud computing and product development. On the other hand, emerging professions also reflect the continuing importance of human interaction in the new economy, giving rise to greater demand for care economy jobs; roles in marketing, sales and content production; as well as roles at the forefront of people and culture. Indeed, the future of work shows demand for a broad variety of skills that match these professional opportunities, inclusive of both disruptive technical skills but also specialized industry skills and core business skills.≥There are seven emerging professional clusters and 96 jobs of tomorrow within them that vary in their individual rate of growth and in the scale of job opportunities they offer in the aggregate.