The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, published January 2025, projects that 170 million new roles will be created and 92 million displaced globally by 2030, yielding a net increase of 78 million jobs. Total job disruption will affect 22% of the global workforce.
Key drivers: technological change (especially AI and information processing, cited by 86% of employers), demographic shifts, geoeconomic tensions, and energy transition. Workers can expect 39% of their existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. Analytical thinking remains the most sought-after skill, followed by resilience, flexibility, and leadership.
The biggest absolute job growth sits in frontline roles: farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, sales, and food processing. The fastest percentage growth is in technology, green energy, and AI-related roles (AI trainers, prompt engineers, ethics overseers, data curators).
The report does not directly quantify an AI-skilled wage premium. A “+56% wage premium” figure circulated on social media in connection with the report but could not be independently traced to the WEF publication itself; it may originate from a separate analysis.
Relevance to the AI Gap thesis: The net-positive jobs figure (+78M) does not eliminate the training argument — it strengthens it. The 92M displaced roles and the 170M new ones require different skills. Without structured retraining, the people losing jobs are not the same people filling the new ones. The 39% skill-set transformation figure is a direct case for mandatory, funded AI literacy programmes rather than voluntary guidance.