Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow

The report argues that proactive job transitions are essential to mitigate displacement caused by technology and climate change. It introduces a four-pillar framework—reskilling, improved matching, safety nets, and multistakeholder collaboration—and identifies global trends toward digital, healthcare, and business services roles.

• Global labour markets are facing significant disruption, with projections indicating that nearly 25% of all jobs will change by 2027, resulting in 69 million new roles and 83 million displacements.
• Three consistent global trends in job transitions were identified across all studied regions: a rapid increase in transitions to digital and ICT-based roles, a high frequency of moves into human-centric health and care positions, and a rise in transitions to business services roles.
• The proposed framework for enabling job transitions rests on four key levers: reskilling and upskilling, improving employee-employer matching, establishing worker safety nets, and fostering multistakeholder collaboration to overcome industry barriers.
• Reskilling is identified as a continuous necessity rather than a one-time event, with projections suggesting that 44% of skills required for any given job will be transformed over five years.
• In East Asia and the Pacific, specific regional trends include high demand for Registered Nurses in Australia due to an ageing population and the dominance of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in the Philippines, which contributed $29.1 billion to the local economy in 2023.
• European initiatives like the EU Pact for Skills aim to support digital and green transitions; as of the publication date, over 2,500 organizations are involved, and more than 3.5 million workers received training in 2022 and 2023.
• In Latin America and the Caribbean, transitions into Sales Representative and Office/Administrative Assistant roles are frequent and serve as potential drivers for social mobility because they often do not require formal credentials.
• In the United States, the most frequent job transition is from Health Technician/Technologist to Registered Nurse, while the second most frequent is from Light Truck Delivery Driver to Tractor-Trailer Truck Driver, though the latter faces uncertainty from autonomous vehicle technology.
• South Asia shows a strong trend of transitions into Software Developer/Engineer roles, particularly from Manufacturing/Production Technician roles in India and Technology Consultant roles in Pakistan.
• Sub-Saharan Africa, represented by South Africa, sees common transitions into Sales Representative and Software Developer roles, while the region overall struggles with a high informal employment rate of 89.2%.

APA

World Economic Forum (2024). Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_CNES_Unlocking_Opportunity_Job_Transitions_2024.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow. 2024. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_CNES_Unlocking_Opportunity_Job_Transitions_2024.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow |date=September 2024 |url=https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_CNES_Unlocking_Opportunity_Job_Transitions_2024.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2024unlocking, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Unlocking Opportunity: A Global Framework for Enabling Transitions to the Jobs of Tomorrow}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2024}, month = sep, url = {https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_CNES_Unlocking_Opportunity_Job_Transitions_2024.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }