McKinsey study shows AI creates more jobs than automation eliminates – but 11 million American workers will need help this decade

Our new research reveals that the U.S. economy will have more jobs by 2035 than today. But the distribution will be different, forcing many workers to retrain or acquire qualifications.

About 11 million Americans may have to abandon one declining occupation for an entirely different one. Many will find work in the occupational group they already know, but an average of 770,000 workers per year will need to change occupations over the next decade, 3.6 times the historical rate. COVID-19 produced a similar surge, but it lasted a year or two. This will last at least a decade.

Let’s take the example of an administrative assistant who has spent a decade running a department. Our research reveals that automation could take over 80% of hours worked in the office and administrative support sector, the occupational group facing the greatest job losses by 2035.

Administrative assistants have one path to a growing, higher-paying job: project manager. Their skills match those of a project manager better than you might think. They already plan, schedule, coordinate operations, document decisions, and manage stakeholders, tasks that take up about 58% of what a project manager does. The gap is real but manageable: project planning methods, process improvement, forecasting, quality management and business development.

But a requirement is a big obstacle. Many project manager positions require a bachelor’s degree and professional certification. The transition offers a substantial salary increase and requires significant investments in education and degree attainment to achieve it. The major constraint is not whether they can do the job. It’s a question of whether they are willing to invest thousands of dollars and several years to prove it.

Other transitions are more difficult. A diver seeking to become a home health aide, a profession that will grow, only has about 20 percent of the required skills. They would have to learn patient assistance and vital sign assessment and complete a month of training to become certified — and many employers prefer a practical nursing degree which takes even more time. Additionally, 92 percent of health care support jobs are in the bottom two wage quintiles, leaving little room for lifestyle improvements.

A packager moving into manufacturing, another profession likely to grow, faces a different obstacle. About 52% of their skills, such as lifting, quality control and operating equipment such as forklifts, would be transferred, and with this transfer comes a significant increase. In addition, there are no educational requirements that stand in their way. But manufacturing requires mechanical assembly, drilling and fine motor skills, training on specific equipment, and advanced quality control procedures.

Credentials, required in 85 percent of growing jobs, are the most common barrier workers must overcome. About 38 percent are mandated by law and focused where public safety and trust are at stake. But another 47 percent reflect employer preferences for a degree, certificate or job title. Nearly half of accreditation issues are hiring conventions rather than a security rule – and conventions are easier to change.

Even short-term training programs can be unaffordable in the only currency that matters: lost wages. A worker with modest savings or a dependent child can reasonably refuse a path that pays off well over 10 years, because it first requires months without pay.

Employers have the greatest interest in making pathways to job creation more direct, especially given the country’s aging population. A company that lays off administrative staff in one division while posting project coordinator positions in another has created its own talent shortage. Hiring based on demonstrated skills, abandoning degree requirements that no law requires, using hands-on assessments, and creating apprenticeships for existing workers costs less than hiring a qualified foreigner.

States can help by reducing professional licensing requirements and making degrees modular and stackable, so that short qualifications expand into longer qualifications. Colleges and workforce training agencies can design programs “backwards” from what growing occupations require and publish what their graduates earn. Governments can offer incentives such as education grants and tax incentives for retraining individuals and tax breaks for businesses that help workers acquire new skills and degrees.

Workers have their own interest in acquiring skills, and employers indicate what they want. Since 2022, positions requiring proficiency in AI have increased eleven-fold, those seeking adaptability five-fold, and those requiring resilience, curiosity and a willingness to learn three-fold. More than 70 percent of workers will need new skills even if they never change employers.

But none of these workers can shorten the time to get a license, self-fund a year without pay, or save time on a manufacturing line. The administrative assistant already has more than half of the skills a project manager needs. Whether they – and millions like them – get the rest depends largely on employers and the institutions that set working conditions. Facilitating access to the jobs of tomorrow is in the interest of businesses and workers, and will benefit households, communities and the economy as a whole.

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