IBM Predicts 57% of Skills Could Be Obsolete by 2030

Additional Resources

• IBM Enterprise 2030 Report
• Indeed Hiring Lab
• Monster Hiring Trends

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Welcome to Cornering the Job Market for Monday, January 19th. Today’s headlines include new reports from IBM and indeed on how AI is impacting the job market. Does that sound like a recurring theme? Yeah, it is. AI is everywhere and it’s going to remain everywhere. If you’re part of the workforce, just know that it is coming whether you want it to or not. Practically every profession is going to be affected in the not too distant future. This isn’t years from now. These things are happening right now. And I can barely keep up with all the headlines, the news, the data, the surveys, the reports. They’re constant, but I’ll do my best. And if you stick with me, I’ll share it as soon as it comes out. So let’s just get right to it for today. Here’s a quote worth paying attention to. It’s 63 pages. It’s a really long study. So I won’t try to go through all of it, but I will share some job-specific highlights from it. 57% who took the survey expect most current employee skills to be obsolete by 2030. Now, this is not an insignificant, obscure organization. This is IBM. More than half of executives globally expect that most of the skills that employees have today will be obsolete within five years.

1:40

If that doesn’t catch your attention, I don’t know what will. Two-thirds of the executives surveyed say job roles are already becoming shorter lived. What that essentially means is the position you hire someone for today or are hired into will quickly become irrelevant or will at least become irrelevant on an increasing basis. The top skills needed over the next few years will be problem solving or crisis resolution, innovation, adaptability, analytics and data science, and time management and prioritization. One of the themes throughout the report is that specific skills will become diminished as AI is able to do more. 67% of executives say mindset will be more important than skills by 2030. They recommend recruiting and hiring for someone who has a growth mindset rather than a static skill set. It’s very different than how hiring happens today, or at least how recruiting happens today, but it makes sense the more you think about it. So essentially, companies won’t need people who can do certain things. They need people where they will need people who think a certain way. It’s fascinating to see how that’s going to evolve over time. Here’s the last thing that I’ll share, which I find just wild. I’ll read directly from the report. Across all age groups, at least twice as many employees say they would embrace rather than resist greater use of AI by their employers in 2026.

3:07

Okay, that’s not the crazy part. While not everyone is on board, 63% of employees would work in collaboration with an AI agent, and nearly half, 48%, say they’d be comfortable being managed by one. So half of employees are willing to be managed by AI. This isn’t down the line. This is now, this is 2026. I don’t know how to feel about that. Would you like to be managed by a robot? I mean, it’s drama-free, I suppose, objective reasoning, you know, no subjectivity there. Maybe I could warm up to this. Let me know what you think about that. In the next story, you’ll see there’s no need to worry too much yet, because if you think every company is hiring for AI, the data says not even close. Hiring Lab looked at indeed job descriptions and tracked how many employers have at least one job posting that mentions AI. It climbed from about 2% in 2018 to 5.7% by November 2025. That’s nearly tripling, which sounds significant, but about 94% of companies haven’t yet posted a job mentioning AI. And it’s highly concentrated too. In 2025, almost 90% of all AI job-related postings came from just 1% of companies. The size of the organization seems to be the determining factor. The smaller the firm, the less likely they are to be adopting AI, at least according to their job postings. I’ll get to that more in a second.

4:41

Only 1.3% of the bottom third had an AI-related job posting compared to almost half, 49.9% of the top 1%. Now, Indeed equates postings to adoption, and I just don’t agree with that assessment. Now they’re basing that on the data that they have, what they have visibility to, which is, of course, job postings. But if you stop and think about it, the largest companies have budget to hire for an AI-specific role, someone who’s dedicated to that. Small and medium businesses, they don’t have that. They have people wearing a lot of hats that exist through all facets of the organization, and specifically as it relates to AI. And also, smaller companies are restricted by the same governance and rules that come with an enterprise organization when it comes to everything, but again, specifically with AI, so they’re much more likely to implement solutions in just a much looser fashion. So, in my opinion, this is a case of the data not really telling us the entire story. And finally, for today, Monster’s Analysis says the 2026 labor market is being powered less by hype roles and more by high-volume essential categories that keep the economy functioning. This is from an article they just published titled Five Roles Employers Are Hiring for at Scale in 2026. The data behind the list comes from aggregated job postings on their site over the last year. These are job categories with millions of open postings, so big numbers for sure.

6:21

Let’s run down the list. At the top are registered nurses and clinical care roles, which are driven by our aging populations, staffing shortages, and higher care utilization. Specific positions are RNs, sonographers, lab techs, and dialysis nurses. I don’t think anyone’s surprised to hear that. Healthcare is ruling the day and will be for a long time. And keeping with that, second on the list are caregivers and behavioral health professionals. We’re seeing these positions in all the data too. So this is where we are. So if you’re early in your career or you’re close to someone who’s trying to figure out where to go in their career, this is a very safe place to be. Remember, we’re talking about jobs at scale here, and that means they’re not going to be impacted nearly as fast as more specific or niche functions. Also on the list are retail and frontline sales. So despite automation, Monster says employers are still investing in physical locations, customer experience, and local management. So that’s driving demand for positions like retail sales specialists, store managers, and assistant restaurant managers. Next are administrative and office support positions. Specifically because of AI. But again, this is our prediction. It’s based on job postings over the past year. I expect this area in particular to be hit really hard by automation in the near future. I think these, in many ways, in many cases, are going to be among the first jobs to be hit and the easiest to hit.

8:01

So I’ll be curious to see how this plays out when we look back a year from now. And then the final spot is skilled trades, logistics, and technical support. That seems like they’re lumping a lot of a diverse group of jobs into one category. I’m not sure why. Very different kind of jobs in that category, but okay, sure, Monster, you get to do it at your list. I guess you wanted to have it be a top five list instead of instead of seven or eight. But look, for me, this is a reminder. If this is even remotely close to coming to fruition and being accurate, I think it could, that the labor market’s core isn’t going to change as fast as the headlines. Right? So we are seeing these headlines, just like I started the show today, AI everywhere. We know that. But although that adoption is happening and happen happening rapidly, it won’t be overnight. So really, this is a good reminder of that, not just in general, but for me in particular, because I do get wrapped up in all of the AI news and I see it happening, but it’s not like flipping a light switch. It’s more like a dimmer switch, although that dimmer switch is being turned up um constantly. So those are your headlines for today. And I will check back on this monster list a year from now. Hopefully they’re right. Hopefully we’re not gonna see a lot of jobs lost in the admin and clerical space, but I think we will.

9:35

Anyway, before we go, here’s your fun fact. Charles Darwin invented the modern office chair by putting wheels on a study chair to move between specimens faster. How about that? I have an office chair. I move between my desk and the dog. I have to, I only have one with me right now. I don’t know where the other one is, but I move between my dogs. That’s kind of moving between specimens, right? Same thing. Yeah, talking to you. There he is looking. Hey, Henry. So there we are. Those are your headlines for today, and your fun fact as always. Thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone you believe might be interested. And I look forward to talking soon.