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- Caroline Mercer via Fortune | FORTUNE
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- Economy·6 min to read
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McKinsey: AI to Create More Jobs Than It Displaces, but 11 Million US Workers Will Need Retraining by 2035
ReMcKinsey: AI to Create More Jobs Than It Displaces, but 11 Million US Workers Will Need Retraining by 2035
New McKinsey research finds the US economy will have more jobs by 2035, but roughly 11 million workers may need to leave shrinking occupations for entirely different ones. An average of 770,000 workers a year will need to cross occupational lines, 3.6 times the historical rate, with credentials and forgone wages posing the biggest hurdles.
The United States will have more jobs in 2035 than it does today, but the mix of those jobs will shift so dramatically that roughly 11 million American workers may need to leave a shrinking occupation for an entirely different one, according to new research from McKinsey. An average of 770,000 workers a year will need to cross occupational lines over the next decade, a rate 3.6 times the historical norm. While the COVID-19 pandemic produced a similar surge in job transitions, that disruption lasted only a year or two. This one is expected to last at least a decade.
The research finds that automation could absorb 80 percent of the hours worked in office and administrative support, the occupational group facing the largest job losses by 2035. For an administrative assistant who has spent years keeping a department running, the most direct pathway to a growing, better-paying job is project manager. Their existing skills—planning, scheduling, coordinating operations, documenting decisions, and managing stakeholders—already cover about 58 percent of what a project manager does. The remaining gap includes project-scheduling methods, process improvement, forecasting, quality management, and business development. But many project-manager postings require a bachelor's degree and a professional certification, meaning the transition demands substantial investments in schooling and credentialing. The binding constraint is not whether these workers can do the job, but whether they are willing to spend thousands of dollars and several years to prove it.
Other transitions are harder. A dishwasher seeking to become a home health aide, an occupation that will grow, has only about 20 percent of the required skills. They would need to learn patient assistance and vital-sign assessment and complete a month of instruction to be certified, and many employers prefer a nursing assistant credential that takes longer still. Additionally, 92 percent of healthcare support jobs are in the bottom two wage quintiles, offering little room to improve their lifestyle. A packager moving into production fabrication faces a different obstacle. About 52 percent of their skills, such as lifting, quality control, and operating equipment like forklifts, would transfer, and the move comes with a meaningful raise. No credential requirement stands in their way, but fabrication requires mechanical assembly, drilling, fine motor skills, training on specific equipment, and advanced quality-control procedures.
Credentials, required in 85 percent of growing jobs, are the most common hurdle workers must overcome. About 38 percent are mandated by law, concentrated where safety and public trust are at stake. But another 47 percent reflect employer preferences for a degree, certificate, or job title. Nearly half the credential problem is a hiring convention rather than a safety rule—and conventions are easier to change. Even short training programs can be unaffordable in the only currency that matters: forgone wages. A worker with modest savings or a child to care for can rationally decline a pathway that pays off handsomely over 10 years because it first requires months without pay.
Employers have the biggest interest in making pathways to growing jobs more direct, particularly given the country's aging population. A company laying off administrative staff in one division while posting project-coordinator openings in another has created its own talent shortage. Hiring on demonstrated skills, dropping degree screens no law requires, using practical assessments, and building apprenticeships for existing workers costs less than hiring a credentialed outsider. States can help by pruning occupational licensing requirements and making credentials modular and stackable, so short qualifications add up into longer ones. Colleges and worker-training agencies can design programs backward from what growing occupations require, and publish what their graduates earn. Governments can offer incentives like subsidized education and tax incentives for retraining for individuals and tax breaks for companies that help workers attain new skills and credentials.
Workers have their own interest in building skills, and employers are signaling what they want. Since 2022, postings demanding AI fluency have risen elevenfold, those seeking adaptability fivefold, and those requiring resilience, curiosity, and willingness to learn threefold. More than 70 percent of workers will need new skills even if they never change employers. But none of these workers can shorten a licensing timeline, self-fund a year without pay, or buy time on a fabrication line. The administrative assistant already has more than half the skills a project manager needs. Whether they—and millions like them—acquire the rest depends largely on employers and institutions that set the terms of work. Making pathways to the jobs of the future easier to navigate is in the interest of companies and workers alike, and will pay off for households, communities, and the economy at large.
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