While the Future of Jobs Survey is designed to look to the near-term future based on the views of the leaders shaping the decisions affecting the future of work, it is equally important to develop a clear sense of recent trends and consider their projections into the future. The World Economic Forum’s data collaboration with LinkedIn helps trace trends in hiring for a range of roles across the period 2013–2017. This data reveals the recent past and the adaptation that has already occurred across roles, impacting the lives and livelihoods of a variety of professionals. 

An average rate of change was calculated to reveal the share of hiring for each role from LinkedIn’s 653 codified occupations. LinkedIn analysts expressed the monthly hires of any one job as a proportion of all hires across jobs in each relevant industry within any one calendar month. A linear regression line was fitted to aggregate the generalized trend and to reveal multi-year trends that point to the prioritization of hiring across industries. The resulting lists of roles and scale of change are featured in Figures 9 and 10 and reveal, across industries and geographies, the roles that in the aggregate experienced the greatest upward or downward trend in demand from 2013–2017. The trends highlight business prioritization of new hires, namely the roles which employers believed to be the most appropriate investments to prepare their enterprises for success over the relevant period.

The data reveals that the Basics and Infrastructure industry has experienced a boom in real estate brokerage hires, but a decreasing relative demand for engineering roles and for technicians of various kinds. In the Consumer industry, the demand for Sales Managers was outpaced by demand for Marketing Managers and Software Engineers, while the inverse was true for the Energy industry cluster, where the demand for Managerial and Sales personnel has outpaced demand for Technicians and Engineers. A similar trend can be observed in the Information and Communication Technology industry. Here, relative demand for Systems Administrators has been outpaced by an increase in hires specializing in Experience Design and Marketing. In the Healthcare sector, more specialized roles in nutrition and mental health have experienced rising demand in contrast to generalist roles such as Nursing staff or Medical Officers. A slowdown in hiring trends within the Professional Services sector appears to have distinctively impacted creative, editorial and journalistic roles, all reflecting recent disruptions to the publishing industry. A downward trend among the hiring profile of journalistic professions has seen a matching increase in new hires across broader content writing roles.

Across all regions, digital, marketing and talent-related professions dominate the list of roles that have experienced upward hiring trends alongside marketing specialists, and professionals specializing in software engineering, Data Analysts, User Experience Designers and Human Resources Specialists. 

The East Asia and the Pacific region has experienced falling demand for more traditional technical professions such as Engineering, and that trend is mirrored in the Middle East and North Africa region. In a similar fashion, historic hiring trends reveal a decline in hires of technical professions, such as Database Administrators and Electrical Engineers in South Asia. The Latin America and Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa regions saw a decline in new hires into roles focused on accounting, administrative activities and in supply chain specialization. Finally, Western Europe has experienced a slowdown in the relative hiring of creative professionals, reflecting recent disruptions in the publishing industry.

Figure 9: Top ten most emerging and declining roles between 2013–2017 as observed in hiring trends, by industry 
(rate of change)

Source: LinkedIn.

Figure 10: Top ten most emerging and declining roles between 2013–2017 as observed in hiring trends, by region
(rate of change)

Source: LinkedIn.