Decorative 2025 greeting card with modern black and white graphics to celebrate an event or the New ... [+]
Are you ready for 2025? Are you sure?
As an independent career and executive coach and job market observer, I am often flooded – especially at this time of year – by requests for predictions and projections for next year. Well, economists make projections and fools make predictions – and I’m neither, I like to believe.
However, there are each year prominent factors at work – either overt or covert – that will inevitably shape the year ahead and beyond, and I’m comfortable giving you my expectations, not of what the outcomes will be, but what to watch. So I set expectations instead.
Some are recognizably connected to the job market, others are a stretch, but they could all keep me up at night – if I got paid enough to lose sleep. (I don’t, so I don’t.)
Here, then, is my watchlist for 2025: things I fear and things I hope for in the job market. For what it’s worth…
1. AI will continue to dominate.
While I was a very early observer to recognize the potential of AI, and one of the first to definitively declare that it would be the greatest single transformation in human history, that’s not enough. The issue now is the conflict between full-speed-ahead development with little or no regulation and sensible regulation marked by cautious ambition. Next year will be critical either way.
2. Will the job market remain healthy?
Over the past four years, every measurement was exemplary, as the job market continued to grow not only in quantity, but in quality as well. This was a job market that was firing on all cylinders, a harmonious machine. That was no accident, though, but the product of constructive thought, strong commitment, bold ideas, and relentless follow through. This is a climate that thrives when maintained but is vulnerable when neglected.
3. Degrees or certificates?
A holdover from my 2024 list, the pronounced shift in emphasis – led by big tech – from academic degrees to professional certificates is continuing. Strong arguments can be made for each, but what we’re headed for is being identified as a country with either trained or educated workers.
4. Pass the chips, please.
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is huge, and will create thousands of jobs in expansive manufacturing facilities in Arizona, Ohio, and New York. Long needed: more than 1.5 trillion chips are manufactured worldwide each year, and America’s share has sunk to 12%, and even lower in advanced microprocessors. This changes things, which is why it appears on my list for the second straight year. But will the Trump administration continue the Biden initiative?
5. Unqualified, incompetent, or otherwise inappropriate leadership picks.
Honestly, if you were just appointed CEO of a gigantic organization and started hiring top executive with no experience or a belief that their division shouldn’t be doing its defined work or were too intimate with your competition – how long would it be before you were looking for another job? Now project that scenario on the lineup of President-elect Trump’s nominees. My concern is for the job market, which doesn’t typically react too well to this kind of commotion.
6. Crypto’s resurgence.
Cryptocurrency’s global value of $3.48 trillion as of December 29 is four times the size it was on January 4, just 51 weeks ago, and is now greater than 3% of global GDP. That’s quite a difference from a year ago. Now crypto has champions in all the right places, as well. I won’t comment on crypto from a finance or banking point of view, as that’s light years from my wheelhouse. I will, however, comment from a career and executive coach’s vantage point. Plain and simple: Danger ahead.
Interesting times on the immediate horizon.
