A survey of top strategy executives from companies across 12 career industries and 20 developed and emerging economies found that robots will perform more tasks than the 71 percent jobs being done by human employees at present. This industrial revolution would create 133 million new jobs to replace the almost 75 million employees that robots are set to displace between 2022 and 2025.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will see the rise in the demands for data analysts and data scientists, software and applications developers, and e-commerce and social media specialists. Jobs that also require distinctly human skills will be in demand. Such jobs are sales and marketing professionals, innovation managers and customer service workers.
Roles that are at risk of being automated include routine-based white-collar roles such as data entry clerks, accounting and payroll clerks.
As for employee competencies, companies will be increasingly looking for people who can demonstrate technical proficiency in design and programming, as well as creative human skills like critical thinking and persuasion.
Businesses will also be open to hire freelancers, implement more flexible working arrangements like having employees work remotely. Companies will also begin to set up more offices in regions and location where more talents are accessible.
East Asia and the Pacific and Western Europe will see rising demands for financial and investment advisors. Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will need more assembly and factory workers while North America will need more electrotechnology engineers.
The survey was released by the World Economic Forum in the report titled The Future of Jobs 2018. It was released coinciding with the 12th Annual Meeting of the New Champions that is happening from Sept. 18 to 20 in Tianjin, China. The theme for this year's meeting is Shaping Innovative Societies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The research aims to inform decision-makers on the potential of new technologies to disrupt and create jobs. At the same time, the report also hopes to make people address the emerging roles of the future.
The report also found that 54 percent of current employees need to undergo both re-skilling and up-skilling training in order to ride the waves of the Fourth Industrial Revolution but only 50 percent of the companies surveyed were inclined to provide re-skilling for their current employees.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, called for businesses to choose to support their existing workforces through reskilling and upskilling. He also called for the governments worldwide to enable an environment that will facilitate their workforce transformation in line with the next industrial revolution.
