What does the video cover?
- ■Two numbers
- ■Different fields
- ■Who must move
- ■Mobility, not scarcity
- ■The pace of switching
- ■The bridges
- ■Place
- ■Shifts before
Transcript
The McKinsey Global Institute studied how AI will change jobs in the United States by 2035. Fortune reported on the study. McKinsey estimates that AI and automation will cut demand for about 36 million jobs. It estimates that growth in other areas will create about 41 million jobs.
The new jobs are not in the same fields as the old jobs. The report says the shrinking jobs are mostly in office support, retail and transportation. The growing jobs are mostly in healthcare, construction and management.
Some workers will need to leave their occupation completely. In its base case, McKinsey estimates about 11 million workers. That is about 7 percent of the workforce. The estimate has a range of 6 million to 16 million. The report says lower-wage workers are 7.6 times as likely as higher-wage workers to need a new occupation.
The report's authors put the idea in one line. "The next decade's challenge is mobility, not scarcity." In their view, the jobs will exist. The problem is getting workers into them.
McKinsey says most of these workers must jump to a different field, for example from retail to healthcare. It estimates about 770 thousand people a year must make that kind of switch. That is about 3.6 times the historical average. The report notes that about 788 thousand workers a year made similar moves from 2019 to 2022. That was during the pandemic. The report says those moves caused no lasting damage.
Not every path is the same. The report says only one in seven displaced workers has a direct path into a growing job. A direct path needs little retraining and pays at least as much. Nearly half face what the report calls an "unpaved" path. Large skill gaps or credential rules block it. About 85 percent of growing jobs require a credential.
Place is the other hurdle. McKinsey found that about 76 percent of growing jobs cannot be done remotely. These include jobs in hospitals, on construction sites and in data centres.
Richard Florida, an urbanist, gave Fortune his view. He was not part of the McKinsey report. He said shifts like this have happened before. In his words, most people once worked in agriculture, and now 1 percent do. He said 50 to 60 percent once worked in manufacturing, and now 5 to 6 percent do.