Job Market Trends for 2025: Emerging Skills, Industries, and Opportunities

The job market has been cooling off following a much-ballyhooed period of growth. Yes, the U.S. is still adding jobs, but more slowly than the red-hot rate of recent years, which means it’s time to bid farewell, at least for now, to the days of 200,000 or more new jobs being added every month. An economist for Moody’s Analytics recently projected that monthly job growth will fall to 100,000 by early next year and 50,000 by the end of 2025, "hovering around that level for the long term as baby boomers continue to retire in droves."


Economic headwinds aside, the job market is evolving as emerging skills and innovations rise to the fore. Here are four trends to keep an eye on in 2025.


Increased adoption of new technologies


According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), more than 75% of companies plan to adopt technological advancements in areas like big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence over the next few years. The good news, according to WEF’s latest "Future of Jobs" report: "The impact of most technologies on jobs is expected to be a net positive over the next five years," with data analytics, climate change technology, and cybersecurity ranking among the biggest drivers of growth. Other fields seeing a boost from evolving technologies include wind turbine service technicians, solar photovoltaic installers, and computer scientists, each of which ranks in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ top 10 "Fastest Growing Occupations."


The continued ascendance of AI


AI is reshaping various industries, and not always in ways that benefit workers. Indeed, the WEF expects AI to "result in significant labor-market disruption, with substantial proportions of companies forecasting job displacement." Like it or not, AI is here to stay, but the good news is that it’s also creating new opportunities in the job market.