🌍 World Economic Forum - Davos Future of Work, Summarized

World Economic Forum 2024

I watched all the work-related Davos discussions so you don’t have to.

It’s that time of year when our world leaders descend upon Davos, Switzerland with the 2024 theme “Rebuilding Trust in the Future”. Big oof considering they continue to arrive in droves of short-haul private jets to discuss climate change.

The 2024 annual meeting agenda consisted of three core tracks:

• Growth and Jobs

• AI - Artificial Intelligence

• Climate, Nature, and Energy

I dug into all the Growth and Jobs talks and consolidated it. Here’s what you have to know.

Gen-AI: Changing the landscape

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Staff Discussion Note finds almost 40% of employment globally is exposed to AI, which rises to 60% in advanced economies. Among workers, women and those who are college-educated are more exposed to AI. It is anticipated that they will reap the benefits as stronger productivity gains could boost growth and wages.

Saadia Zahidi stated that 23% of today’s jobs will change and be affected by AI.

Gen-AI is forcing a demand shift in skills. 44% of workers’ core skills are expected to change in the next five years. 

Knowledge workers who leverage generative AI won’t all have the same performance improvement impact as one another. Predictions say that those with less experience will have a bigger improvement in performance capability when using Gen-AI than those with more experience. There’s a suspected close in performance and experience gaps because of this.

The Reskilling Revolution Continues

The WEF gave an update on their Reskilling Revolution. It pledged to reach 1 billion people with better education, skills, and job opportunities in the decade between 2020-2030. Their efforts leveraged the power of companies, governments, and public/private collaboration to make massive strides toward the goal. Just four years in, WEF has impacted over 650 million people. Bravo, team!

With talks about AI shifting worker skills, the topic of reskilling and upskilling didn’t stop at the WEF initiative itself. Fostering cultures of lifelong learning was a core theme throughout most talks and tracks.

Talent is a hot C-Suite topic. “Talent used to be more transactional. It’s now really top of mind in all C-suite discussions”, says Denis Machuel, CEO of the Adecco Group on a panel about reskilling.

He shares activities all leaders should consider:

• Talent Mapping - What is your workforce strategy and where are your strengths? What are the skills that are going to be disrupted and become obsolete?

• Employee Experience - What are you doing to ensure you have the attractiveness to recruit the right people?

• Internal Mobility - How are you deploying skills and maintaining relevancy?

• Career Transitions - How are you adjusting to your workforce?

Who should pay for all of this upskilling and retraining? It’s up for debate. In most parts of the world, particularly K-12, there’s an obvious expectation that the learner will not pay. As we age, the question becomes should the learner, employer, or government pay?

The UK was given as an interesting example. The government doesn’t pay for upskilling directly, they impose a company tax that goes towards worker training. Not their workers, but all workers in the community. Leaning into the concept that talent is fungible - training them is a collective action.

Trendspotting 2030

The Future is Now 

I didn’t have to wait long to see these themes in the real world. Check out how Kal Stefano, a talented Senior Motion Graphic Designer leverages Chat GPT to develop tools for his creative process. What would have been restricted to those willing to learn in-depth coding is now manageable and accessible.

P.S. Kal is available for hire and is one of the most talented Motion Graphic Designers I’ve worked with so give him a shout for any needs.

📈 Nerd Alert 📉 

It was a week full of research report releases. Here are some fave facts and figures.