Research by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has found that COVID-19 has caused the labour market to change faster than expected, and that by 2025, automation and a new division of labour between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally spanning 15 industry sectors and 26 economies. The Future of Jobs 2020 report also found that roles in areas such as data entry, accounting and administrative support are decreasing in demand as automation and digitization in the workplace increases. "More than 80% of business executives are accelerating plans to digitize work processes and deploy new technologies; and 50% of employers are expecting to accelerate the automation of some roles in their companies." "COVID-19 has accelerated the arrival of the future of work," said Saadia Zahidi, Manging Director at the WEF. "It's a double disruption scenario that presents another hurdle for workers in this difficult time. The window of opportunity for proactive management of this change is closing fast. Businesses, governments and workers must plan to urgently work together to implement a new vision for the global workforce."

Technology is driving major shifts in the job market, and that will require corporations, governments, and individuals to embrace new strategies, according to a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Burning Glass Technologies, What's Trending in Jobs and Skills, being released today. BCG and Burning Glass, a leading provider of real-time labor market information, studied 95 million online job listings in the US from 2015 through 2018. The authors analyzed the number and growth rate of job listings and skill requirements across broad sectors and within hundreds of specific job areas, as classified by the US Labor Department's O*NET occupation system. Through this analysis, the report identifies the fastest-growing jobs and the fastest-growing skills in the job market. "No other job market study to date has been as statistically extensive or exhaustive," says Rainer Strack, managing director and senior partner at BCG and a coauthor of the report.

How we adopt – and adapt to – artificial intelligence in the workplace will be crucial to the future of our region's economic growth and the very nature of employment. The 4th Industrial Revolution is already bringing many changes. And, policymakers, employers, and civil society organizations across the Asia Pacific are looking for innovative and inclusive ways to maximize the opportunities created by AI. They also want to manage the challenges. Among these is the need to understand what the evidence is telling us. In particular, governments want to see what the likely outcomes are so that they can invest today in policies to re-skill for an AI-driven future.

A few years ago, consulting giant McKinsey predicted that artificial intelligence and automation would eliminate a 73 million jobs by 2030. That's a scary number of jobs, and a prediction that led many professionals to evaluate their own skills and research ways to future-proof their careers from the coming automation/AI job apocalypse. In the absence of an elder expert giving you one word of advice, like "Plastics!" what can an IT professional (or a new graduate) do to ensure that the robots don't come to take your job? That's been a key question over the past few years, and one without that simple one-word answer. Experts have said that jobs focused on implementing and managing artificial intelligence and automation would be great avenues for job-seekers to pursue.

In the previous article, I had outlined the rising anxieties with regard to the rise of A.I. and automation in various sectors of employment. As discussed earlier, there are various jobs that may get redefined in the wake of the automation revolution. But what are the jobs that will remain safe? Also, what are the new skills you may need to acquire to get you ready for an uncertain future? In this article, I will try to answer your questions.

New technologies tend to shift jobs and skills. New technologies bring new products, which shift jobs across occupations. With the arrival of cars, the economy needed more assembly line workers and fewer blacksmiths. New technologies also bring new work processes, which shift skills in jobs. With the arrival of copiers, office workers needed to replace ink cartridges but not use carbon paper.

Machine learning is in; Flash is out. Data scientists are in great demand, specialized developers, not so much. These are just a few of the trends LinkedIn picked up in its 2017 Emerging Jobs Report. It's no surprise that jobs in tech are growing faster than any other industry. The fastest growing job over the last five years is machine learning engineer, as the number of open positions on LinkedIn has multiplied by nearly 10X.

As today's economies become ever more knowledge-based, technology-driven and globalized, and because we simply don't know what the jobs of tomorrow will look like, there is a growing recognition that we have to prepare the next generation with future-ready skills and with the capacity for continued lifelong learning.

New technologies bring new products, which shift jobs across occupations: with the arrival of cars, the economy needed more assembly line workers and fewer blacksmiths. New technologies also bring new work processes, which shift skills in jobs: with the arrival of copiers, office workers needed to replace ink cartridges but not use carbon paper. Economic history is full of examples of new technologies causing such shifts. Workers often worry that new technologies will destroy old jobs without creating new ones. However, economic history suggests that job destruction and creation have always gone together, with a shift in jobs and skills that leaves most people still employed. Will artificial intelligence (AI) differ from past technologies in the way it shifts jobs and skills?