In Conversation with... Till Leopold

In this episode of the Future of Work Hub’s In Conversation podcast, Lucy Lewis speaks with Till Leopold, Head of Work Wages and Job Creation, at the World Economic Forum's Centre for the New Economy and Society. Till shares key insights from the latest Future of Jobs report examining the five major trends that are expected to transform the world of work by 2030. They discuss the nuanced impact of these trends on job creation and displacement and how employers can develop proactive strategies for skills adaptation and reskilling. 

Key takeaways 

1. Technological change, geoeconomic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and the green transition are the major drivers of net job creation as well as displacement. Look beyond the headline numbers to consider the quality of jobs being created and focus on creating "good work" to ensure sustainable growth. 

2.Be proactive in addressing long-term trends including demographic shifts and climate change mitigation alongside immediate challenges. By embedding these considerations into strategic planning now, businesses can position themselves to benefit from future workforce changes and achieve more positive outcomes. 

3.Adopt a balanced approach to skills development. 40% of skills across all roles will change over the next five years but there will be a convergence of two types of skills: technological proficiency and human-centric skills. Foster both skillsets through targeted training and ongoing learning opportunities to equip workers for the skills transition and address skills gaps. 

4.Build trust through meaningful engagement and communication. Reskilling is a crucial component for building trust and employers should take a holistic approach to how they communicate in relation to this, consistently explaining why it matters and giving workers agency to shape new initiatives.

Transcript

Lucy Lewis:

Hello and welcome to our Future of Work Hub ‘In Conversation...’ podcast. I'm Lucy, a partner in Lewis Silkin's 

employment team and whether you're a seasoned listener or this is your first time, I'm delighted you're here to join me 

for some fascinating conversations with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders, exploring how large-scale 

long-term trends and immediate drivers are shaping the world of work. 

Today I'm joined by Till Leopold, Head of Future of Work at the World Economic Forum's Centre for the New Economy

and Society. Earlier this year, Till and his team published their 

Future of Jobs report

. The report is a really 

comprehensive look at the interconnected forces shaping the world of work. Over the past decade, it's tracked evolving

technological, societal and environmental trends, and it's really essential reading for businesses to help them prepare 

for the changes that are reshaping the global labour market, but also develop proactive strategies and build resilient 

and adaptable workforces. 

So, Till, it's great to have you here. I'm so pleased that you're going to be able to take us through the report findings 

and help employers really dial down onto those issues that they should be prioritising on. So, welcome. 

Till Leopold

:

Thank you very much for having me. 

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND BROADENING DIGITAL ACCESS

Lucy Lewis

:

Now, we both know that there's been a huge amount of disruption in recent years, and that's really emphasised the 

importance of foresight when it comes to navigating what is an increasingly complex working landscape and all those 

transitions that we know lie ahead. With so much is changing so quickly, it can sometimes be difficult to see the wood 

from the trees. So, what I thought we could do to start with is take a bit of a step back and look at the bigger picture - 

your roadmap for 2030. 

What your report does is identify five major drivers that are expected to shape and transform the world of work in that 

period to 2030. It'd be great if we could talk through each of those - I'll take you through them - and you can share your

thoughts on why they're in the report, but also the impact on businesses and on the people working within businesses. 

The first one – it’s probably not a surprise to anybody that's listening, it's something that we're all very aware of - is 

technological change and particularly broadening digital access. I'm really interested to hear the reasons why that's 

ranked as the most transformative change.

Till Leopold

:

Thank you very much. We looked at the outlook for jobs over the period 2025 to 2030 and the impact these 

macrotrends or megatrends will have over that period in addition to all the normal change that you already expect in 

labour markets in any case. If I can just quickly take an additional step back just to give you the very high-level picture 

of the report: we're finding that over that five-year period to 2030, we expect from these trends the

 creation of a net 

additional 78 million new jobs in the global economy. So that is obviously a very significant number, it's equivalent to 

the entire workforce today of the UK and France combined for example, but if you look under that, we see the creation 

of 170 million totally new jobs as well as the displacement at the same time of 92 million jobs. So overall this story is a 

nuanced story of a sort of churn if you want, or 

quite a big structural transformation of the labour market underneath 

that net positive overall number. 

We can attribute the majority of this change to - indeed you mentioned it - five big trends. The first and most significant

one by far, according to the people we talked to, is indeed technology. I think what stands out for the technology trend 

in this research, and of course this includes the whole conversation around artificial intelligence and its impact, is that it

is seen as by far the biggest driver of net new job creation but at the same time also as the biggest driver of job 

displacement. Two things to note therefore: it is the single biggest trend and secondly, we do see a net positive impact

but nevertheless a very sort of nuanced picture in terms of both a lot of job creation and job destruction for the 

technology trends in particular.

ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY 

Lucy Lewis

:

That's really interesting. As our listeners know, and Till I know you know, we've done our own smaller report and that 

also indicated a similar finding in that it was a really key issue for business in 2024 and expected to be a key priority 

for 2025. One of the things I'm hoping when we've gone through each of the trends we can come back to, is the issue 

about skills with the evolving technological impact b

ecause one of the things that the people we spoke to talk to us 

about was how you ensure you have the right skills capabilities for that nuanced job displacement - but we'll come 

back to that. 

The second thing I wanted to talk to you about was cost of living, because that was something in our report had ranked

very highly - it ranked highly for businesses in 2024 and with HR professionals saying they saw it as being a key 

strategic change into 2025. So it'd be helpful to share your thoughts about why cost of living - the economic impact - 

was a significant trend that employers should be watching.

Till Leopold

:

Absolutely. So we did look in this report as well, of course, at cost of living and more broadly economic uncertainty - 

that uncertainty including things such as the mid-term inflation outlook and other such factors. So again, in our 

research, we're looking obviously over a five-year period to 2030 and whilst cost of living comes up very clearly as a 

top concern, it is ranked moderately less important than, for example, the technological trend. My interpretation is that 

it’s

 partly because people are not as confident in kind of projecting out what's happening in that space in 2030.

I think there are two things to note on this trend. So firstly, it is really noticeable (this is the fifth edition of this report for 

10 years and every two years we have been taking this measure), is these trends are just coming up a lot more 

prominently than they have perhaps in previous editions except for the edition in early 2020, which dealt with the Covid

situation, of course. So there’s

 just a lot more concern around this issue in general. And then secondly, if we do look at

the job creation impact of this factor - job creation, job displacement - actually we do find that this trend also comes up 

in the aggregate as a net positive job creation trend, which may perhaps seem a little bit counterintuitive. But of 

course, if you think about it, there are actually sectors that are counter-cyclical, right, in terms of consumers kind of 

downshifting a bit and jobs in cheaper, retail, sales 

and so on for example. So again, a positive net job creation 

headline picture here but that also raises the question of job quality and are these the kinds of jobs that we should 

actually celebrate being created or are there additional considerations here? 

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND AGEING WORKFORCES

Lucy Lewis

:

Yeah that's really interesting, particularly when you talk about good work. One of the things we've been talking about 

on this podcast when we project ahead to the future of work is the quality of work - what we mean by “good work” - 

how we can get people engaged in the workforce. 

I was going to take your next two trends together, because this is really interesting to me and the two I was going to 

take together are climate change mitigation and ageing workforces. The reason I say it's particularly interesting to me 

is that on this podcast and in the Future of Work Hub, we've been talking about these two things for a really long time 

a

nd yet we've struggled when we talk to businesses to get them really engaged with these issues on the corporate 

agenda. Businesses know that they're an issue but they're not really dealing with them today. The last guest I had on 

this podcast was Dr. Grace Lordan and I chatted to her a bit about this and she said, well, there's a natural sort of 

present bias - I'll deal with the things that are in front of me at the moment - job displacement, technology infrastructure

- 

that's right in front of me at the moment whereas those longer-term challenges, things like climate change mitigation, 

ageing workforces, I might know they're a problem but they're not today's problem. So I was really interested to hear 

your thoughts both on what you heard and why it's part of the trends that you include in your report but also whether 

you also see that businesses are perhaps not focusing on them in the way they could be. 

Till Leopold

:

Yeah, that's a great point. I think we are seeing a similar picture to what you just described in terms of these trends 

always coming up in the top three to top five but perhaps never the top one. So therefore, it does raise that question 

of, at some point everybody should get serious about starting to address them but it's perhaps never quite the top 

priority item for right now, for this week, for this month. And so of course that does raise the question, when we're 

looking at that 2025 to 2030 period, i

f you do kind of walk backward, obviously at some point you would have had to 

start actually taking it quite seriously to get to more positive outcomes by 2030. 

Now what's interesting I think in our study, and you mentioned sort of the contrast to some of your recent research, is 

that if you look at demographics in particular, we did actually find that people told us it is the second biggest 

macrotrend driving change. I think one reason why that is, is just from the way we asked the question, so we did ask 

people to put themselves into the shoes of 2030 and look back so it's perhaps a slightly more medium-term 

consideration of the issue. W

hat is really important on this trend is that we’re really starting to see dramatic change 

that was more abstract, more conceptual in the more recent past, it’s really starting to kick in now with things such as 

on the ageing workforce side of things with the retirement of the Baby B

oomer generation. But at the same time, you 

also see a lot of younger workforces in emerging market economies continuing to make strides like younger, much 

better educated workforces entering the labour market in these economies. As a consequence of that, if you look at 

the picture between even just 2025 and 2030, at the moment, the core workforce - certainly for the kind of listeners 

that we have on this podcast in terms of big businesses, sort of professional work etc. - a

t the moment we're seeing 

that the total global workforce for these fields is approximately equally spread, so 50% in the old advanced economies 

and 50% in the emerging markets. But within one generation, so in the next 15 years, we will actually see the 

workforce in emerging markets will be 50% larger than in the advanced economies so that is really 

a trend that is just 

accelerating now with demographic change getting underway. I think those are some of the good reasons why people 

should start taking it a lot more seriously in the near term. 

Then if I can just also address the climate change and climate mitigation question, that also didn't come out so strongly

for us as the top trend but what is noticeable about this trend is the trend that people told us is by far the most purely 

net job creating - on average for one job displaced, four new jobs will be created in that field if we get this right. So that

is a significant opportunity that really needs to be seized, a

nd my hope is that perhaps with some of the bigger things 

we're seeing in the world today, people are talking less about this agenda but still actually doing the good work of 

getting that underway. But yeah, it's certainly an interesting question of why that doesn't come out even more strongly 

because certainly it would be warranted to do so, especially given this positive job creation story that we're seeing. 

GEO-ECONOMIC FRAGMENTATION

Lucy Lewis

:

Yeah, I thought that was one of the really interesting observations about your report because obviously what we are 

doing is surveying people in existing economies, as you say, existing businesses and what your report does so 

interestingly is look at where are the new jobs going to be created, and the focus on environmental engineers, 

renewable energy, all of those being industries that will grow in this period. I thought that was that was really 

interesting. 

The last of the five trends I just wanted to cover was the political tensions, geo-economic fragmentation - really an 

interesting area, particularly an interesting area for us in the UK because we surveyed people in a post-election period,

so a period of anticipated change to law and policy and it's interesting that it also comes up as something that is a 

significant trend when we look ahead to that period to 2030. So, interested in your thoughts on that - 

what we'll see in 

relation to that and how businesses can be prepared for that. 

Till Leopold

:

Yeah absolutely. We call this geo-economic fragmentation in the report and to just contextualise our findings on this, 

our report came out in early January 2025 so just ahead of the inauguration of the new US administration b

ut the 

survey was conducted in late 2024, so we already captured some of the sentiment around these issues. I think it's very

noticeable again with that view to 2030 that the trend itself comes up much more prominently than it ever has in 

previous editions of our research as a thing that really does drive transformation. However, again it is somewhat not at 

the scale as for example technological change or even those demographic stories. What we're being told is that the 

ultimate job impact of this is perhaps slightly smaller than these other trends, and I think this is an interesting finding. I 

don't think we have conclusive data on this, but it could be that arguably, the impact of things such as tariffs etc. and 

the re-jigging of the global economy obviously has a very direct immediate economic impact but in terms of the job 

impact in the medium-

term, I think there's some research beyond the work that we have done that suggests that the 

effect of things such as tariffs are often being little bit overestimated, both positively in terms of how much jobs you can

reshore or bring back and also potentially, conversely, in the job destruction being wrought by it. 

I think it's an interesting question if you look at technological change which is obviously a long-term secular change 

and the demographic story and so on – will these more political changes be at the same scale, or ultimately do we 

have some trends that are very structural and long-term? T

his of course has a very strong immediate impact in terms 

of these geopolitical trends but perhaps the picture is still a bit more open and it's more open to being shaped by 

policymakers and others in terms of what that might look like by 2030. 

THE SKILLS TRANSITION

Lucy Lewis

:

One of the things I think is really interesting about this as a trend, and it's a sort of segue into talking about skills, is it's 

almost the contrast of technological skills with these areas of tension, geopolitical fragmentation which call for really 

human-centred skills -

 resilience, agility, social influence, leadership. They sort of end up being the opposite side of 

some of the more technological skills that we are looking for. It's really interesting, I think, when you read your report, 

the emphasis that's placed on those types of skills to address that kind of trend. 

Till Leopold

:

Yeah absolutely, in fact this is also one of the really interesting, nuanced findings from our report. So, if for a moment 

before we get to the skills, you just look again at the kinds of jobs that we see coming up, there's these very clear two 

lenses that you can apply to it. If you look at the fastest growing jobs, it is very much a technology story, right? So you 

have your FinTech engineers, cybersecurity experts, AI people etc. But if you look at the largest growing jobs, they are

perhaps less immediately associated with the future of work story, so jobs in the care economy, in education, frontline 

workers, delivery drivers, sales professionals. And then, of course, we mentioned it around the green transition, a lot of

jobs in technician work, solar panel installation, all of these kinds of things. If you have a holistic look at it, it's a much 

broader category of jobs that we're actually talking about. And so, while the job titles of these jobs might stay the same

over the

 2025 to 2030 period, underneath, so to speak, we find that on average 40% of the skills on essentially any job

are likely to change over these next five years. So there's a very significant skill change, skill churn, as we also call it, 

and the need to respond to that. 

But the good news in this regard is that we see a convergence of two key types of skills that apply pretty much across 

the board - across all of these jobs - to equip people to be ready for the future of work. That is on the one hand broadly

speaking, technology skills - and we're not necessarily talking about these very advanced skills, not everybody needs 

to be an AI engineer or anything like that - just the basic literacy,

 familiarity to work with technology, to know how to 

critically evaluate what technology can and cannot do for you and so on. That will be clearly a very foundational 

literacy for the future. Then to the extent that the technology is taking on some of this work itself, the other dimension 

is what we call human-centric skills (we don't like the term soft skills) but essentially these

 interpersonal social skills 

such as resilience, creative problem solving, collaboration etc. It is the combination of these two kinds of skills that will 

be increasingly in demand across most jobs and that will equip most people for the future. 

Lucy Lewis

:

Thanks, Till. You said we'd come to talk about this skills transition which I think is a really interesting topic. Perhaps 

just numerically because it's right in the middle of the decade but 2025 ends up feeling like a really pivotal year - we've

reorientated work post-pandemic, we're increasingly borderless, we've got this new technology that's becoming 

embedded. Lots of people are working much more flexibly; for some people, they can work from anywhere. Y

et 

suddenly five years to 2030 doesn't feel very long for the skills transition that is being talked about. I'm really interested

in your thoughts about that, from the report about the skills transition and how much of that will involve losing people 

with certain skills versus how much of it will be upskilling - transitioning existing staff with new skills - and how 

employers should go about doing that.

Till Leopold

:

Yeah great question, thank you for that. I think as a first thing, while this 40% change in skills over five years does 

seem very significant - and it is - it's not entirely unprecedented. For example, if you think back to the Covid period, a 

significant amount of the workforce suddenly had to of rejig and work from home and many other people that weren't 

able to do that also had to adjust the way they work very significantly. As we're doing this research every two years, 

we find that at the peak of Covid

, the rate of skill change was actually even larger and it has since gone down a little 

bit. On the one hand, that is related to the Covid peak but there is also a lot more awareness on the need for re-skilling

and on people taking the initiative on it. So we’re starting to see some of the positive story coming through that people 

are much more proactively looking at this and adapting to it and therefore, the rate of skill change needed to keep up 

with the labour market will also be slightly lower. 

To answer your question more directly, one of the calculations we have done in the report is: if you take the world's 

workforce as 100 people, what are their skilling needs? We find that about 41 of those 100 people would be able to, 

without very significant upskilling, continue in their own work with some upskilling here and there and on the job 

learning but essentially not very significantly disrupted. So 41 out of the 100 people. T

hen 29 of the 100 people would 

need significant upskilling to continue in their current role, in their current work. From the responses we have been 

given, there's an expectation that these 29 would be able to do that in their current job, without interrupting their career

with significant change but that it’s just as part of how upskilling could happen at work. Then you have 19 out of the 

100 people that would not be able to continue in their current role s

o there would be significant reskilling needed here 

and really supporting people through this shift from their current roles to transition into new roles that are better fitted to

the future labour market needs. And then last but not least, 11 out of the 100 people would very significantly find that 

their skillset is no longer in demand in the labour market and where it's also not quite clear where they could transition 

to - 11 out of the 100 people that are particularly exposed. Now if you translate 

what the 11 out of the 100 actually 

means for the global workforce, that is 120 million people - that's where there's no ready-made answer essentially. 

That is, of course, a very significant generational challenge for employers, policymakers, labour unions, education 

institutions and people themselves to work together to find solutions for that challenge. But then also for the other 89 

out of the 100 people, employers and governments,

 and everyone will need a tailor-made strategy to support people 

through these transitions.

THE RESKILLING IMPERITIVE

Lucy Lewis

:

One of the things I thought was interesting from your report was the increase in employers anticipating the need to re-

skill, re-train workers. So, recognising it's a problem that employers can't solve by themselves and understanding that 

it's also a policy and an education issue and a bigger generational shift, as you say. I thought it was interesting that an 

increasing number of employers were understanding their responsibility in training, reskilling, retaining workers with 

new skills.

Till Leopold

:

Yeah, absolutely. It was quite an increase from the previous edition of the report two years ago, the number of 

employers that recognised that need for them to really be involved in the active retraining and upskilling of their 

workforce. At the same time, these employers are telling us that skills gaps are the single biggest issue to business 

transformation and driving higher productivity. So, it's not investment capital, it's not regulatory questions, it really is 

the skills. T

here's a very clear self-interest by employers to actually do this. The recognition is nice, but it's also 

absolutely crucial to them to get that right. 

BUILDING TRUST 

Lucy Lewis

:

There was one other thing I just wanted to touch on very briefly and that takes you to the World Economic Forum's 

Global Risks report

 which shows some things that are quite frightening in lots of ways - a world that's characterised by 

greater instability, polarising narratives, eroding trust, eroding insecurity, and all of that happening at a time of really 

rapid change. On this podcast, when we've looked at and talked about the future of work and the role of employers, a 

lot of that discussion has been about the need to retain trust, to build trust, to carry employees on that journey of 

change, of skills, evolution with you

. I'm interested in any thoughts you might have to share with people that are 

listening about how employers can focus on putting trust at the heart of this change that needs to happen; trust in the 

change that needs to happen. 

Till Leopold

:

Great question. Yes, I think that the first thing to say again is that indeed we are finding the same thing across all of 

these trends: building trust and earning that trust will be absolutely crucial to being able to navigate these changes 

well. In the Future of Jobs report, we had an opportunity to compare the perspective of employers and employees in 

terms of asking people: what drives your engagement, employee retention, motivation from both the employer and the 

employee perspective. T

here's some really interesting areas of agreement in that, for example wages, perhaps 

unsurprisingly, comes up fairly highly as providing pathways to progression for people at work. But there’re some 

interesting differences as well between the employer and employee perspectives. For example, we found in this 

edition of the report that for employers, the top trend for driving employee retention, employee engagement, building 

that trust is essentially a greater

 focus on health and well-being by employers themselves. Then if you look at the 

employee perspective, they kind of also agree with this but they have a very different framing of it, which is that it's 

much more important to look around flexibility, working hours, remote work and so on. It's perhaps less around the 

kind of company health and well-being programme and much more about enabling people to design that part of their 

lives for themselves. Similarly,

 something that employees emphasise a lot more over employers is pension schemes if 

you look at longer-term retention within the organisation - there's a lot of concern, again, around demographic change 

etc. That is something that I think is very much on the mind of many employees across many sectors and jobs and not 

something that employers are very actively looking at at the moment, according to our data. 

Just one last point as well - we already talked about skilling and just how crucial that will be – it is unsurprisingly, 

therefore, one of the most top-rated things that employers are telling us: investing in training and keeping people’s 

skills current as a central employee value proposition. Interestingly, it actually comes up as a slightly lower priority from

the employee side and we think that what that means is it's not enough to just say, there will be some training for you - 

a

gain, there needs to be a whole approach around communicating why this matters, how can you do that beyond just 

the training itself? How do you fit that into your 9 to 5 schedule? We all have busy lives, is there encouragement and 

recognition to do this as part of your core job or is there an expectation that you do that as an extracurricular, in which 

case it probably won’t work. So yes, skilling is an absolutely crucial element to building trust, given AI and all that b

ut 

again, you need to have a very holistic approach to it and how you communicate it, consistently explaining why it 

matters and giving people the agency to really feel that they are part of that and not just being talked down to in terms 

of how they need to reskill. 

LEVERAGING EMERGING TRENDS TO UNLOCK GROWTH AND INNOVATION

Lucy Lewis

:

That's really interesting - a lot of really good advice there, particularly on the thoughtful adoption of why you're doing 

things, thoughtful adoption of training and upskilling so people understand the purpose of it and effective 

communication. I think that's really good advice. It’s often one of those things that are overlooked in coming up with 

your strategy, namely 

how you bring people on the journey with you, I think that's fascinating. There's obviously so 

much more we could cover, but I'm afraid we're out of time for today so I'm going to ask you the question that I ask all 

our podcast guests this year and that is: what emerging trend do you think employers should be paying more attention 

to and how can businesses and people leaders leverage that to future-proof their organisations and to unlock growth 

and innovation? 

Till Leopold

:

Great question. I'm going to tell you something that I don't have a ready-made answer for but is something we're 

currently thinking a lot about at the World Economic Forum, which is essentially the impact of artificial intelligence on 

entry-level jobs, career pathways and corporate hierarchies. With AI, agentic AI etc. taking on a lot of the tasks that are

traditionally being done as the grunt work of entry-level work - will we still have entry-level jobs

 at the same scale in the

same way or is there a very significant transformation here? Again, is there perhaps a nuanced answer right? So there

could be some fields where entry-level jobs might not even exist in the same way or other fields which perhaps had 

very high barriers to entry in the past and you can actually widen the pool of applicants that have strong transferable

skills but didn't have the very specific technical expertise that could now be supported through agentic AI, for example. 

So I think the jury is out on that, but it's a really fascinating question. At the same time, if essentially a lot of this 

learning and traditional building up of expertise in the organisation is now just being done by the AI, where will 

organisations actually get the next generation of leaders from in terms of the succession? W

hat does that then mean 

overall for corporate hierarchies, succession planning, etc? I don't have any answers on that, I guess just being aware 

of that and starting to think about that question is a recommendation that I would have for our listeners. 

Lucy Lewis

:

Thank you, Till, a lot of food for thought there and it's been fantastic to have you join us. To listen to more 

conversations like this one, you can 

sign up on our webpage

 or subscribe on your usual channels, and I look forward 

to your company again soon. Until next time, goodbye for now.