AI Didn’t Take Your Job In 2024. What About 2025? Indeed’s Economist Weighs In
If the job market in 2025 is anything like the past few years, one thing is for sure: big changes are coming.
In just a few years, the job market has undergone tremendous upheaval, from pandemic-era layoffs and subsequent hiring frenzy, to the rise of work-from-home, to surges in immigration, to the emergence of large-scale language modeling software promoted as “artificial intelligence”. intelligent”. The year ahead may bring further changes.
Investopedia spoke with Cory Stahle, an economist at job site Indeed, to discuss trends in the job market in 2025. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
INVESTOPEDIA: What trends do you see in job postings that you don’t find in official labor market surveys?
Corey Tang: There has been a lot of discussion about generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market, but we here at Indeed have an interesting perspective.
We can look at job postings asking for AI skills. The impact on the labor market remains small. We found that only about 2 out of every 1,000 jobs require Gen AI skills. There’s a lot of promise behind these tools, but actual adoption of these technologies is still a long way off.
We’re seeing a lot of interesting data on flexibility in our platform. We are seeing more and more employers taking a more skills-based approach to recruitment. We are seeing fewer and fewer openings for roles that require experience. We’re seeing fewer job postings requiring education, and we’re also seeing employers mention benefits and pay transparency in job postings.
INVESTOPEDIA: What do you think is driving the trend towards increased flexibility?
Corey Tang: In part, what’s driving the trend toward increased flexibility is workers’ need for flexibility.
We’ve seen, especially with things like remote work, that many employees still want hybrid or remote work options. Therefore, in a labor market where workers are still hard to find, being able to offer hybrid or remote work options can give employers a leg up in the market.
There are also labor market issues. Although the labor market has cooled somewhat over the past few years, the labor market, especially in some regions, remains quite tight.
We’ve seen a decline in knowledge worker jobs: traditional office jobs, software development, marketing, those types of jobs. Employer demand has cooled significantly.
But in areas like construction and manufacturing and some of the higher-skilled workforce jobs, we’re seeing employer demand that’s still very strong and much greater than what we saw before the pandemic.
INVESTOPEDIA: Going back to AI, it doesn’t sound like AI will take over everyone’s jobs yet, but what will it look like in the coming year? Has it increased a lot? What do you think will happen in 2025?
Corey Tang: It has definitely increased a lot. If we look back a few years ago, the number of job postings and mentions of these things was zero. This thing doesn’t exist at all.
What we’re seeing is growth from scratch. It’s still small, but when you start looking at it, you see it has grown three to four times in the last few years.
Many of the job postings surrounding Gen AI actually focus on roles that create or support the creation of artificial intelligence. We see at Indeed that so-called “math” roles — made up of data scientists, data analysts — are among the top categories using Gen AI. We see this in software development and other technology jobs as well.
But we haven’t seen it in many other less tech-centric roles. We don’t see that much in accounting or sales or any of those areas. As we move into 2025, I think we’ll continue to see this surge and growth.
Even if that triples by 2025, you’ll still only see about 6 posts per thousand. So there’s a lot of room for these Gen AI posts to run.
I think we’re going to continue to see and hear a lot of buzz around it and continue to see a lot of growth. But I think for job seekers, there’s no reason to worry or worry about your job being replaced by artificial intelligence based on this data and some of the other research we’ve done.