Chances are you won’t have your job in 2025 | ABC Local
I’m pretty certain that in 10 years you won’t have the job you have today, and why would you want to?
In 2005 most people were using a Nokia phone, handling emails at their desk and believed social media, Facebook and LinkedIn were just a fad and of no possible use.
Switch to 2015, Nokia is out of the phone business, emails find us wherever we are 24/7 and social media has evolved into a multi-trillion dollar industry complete with new jobs, professions and services.
Fast forward to 2025 and who knows what we will be doing, thinking and working at and on, but the thing I’m certain about is that it will not just be what it is today.
There is a perfect storm of technology, economics, culture, politics and humanity that are all independently evolving, but when you put them altogether you have a profound movement of change ahead.
On the technology front alone there are significant backdrops that will change how, where, when and who works these include the internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, mobile, cloud, 3D printing, machine thinking, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, intelligent buildings, just to name a few.
With the certainty of change, but the uncertainty of what that change may be ABC Local Nightlife’s Tony Delroy and I set out on one of our regular on-air radio expeditions to explore the Future of Work.
Will robots have taken over your job by 2025? What work will we be doing in 2025 that today sounds like a science fiction joke? What are 2025’s most likely jobs and industries? Which of today’s professions are likely to have become irrelevant by 2030? What new professions will have $100,000 plus salaries in 2020, but most people today don’t even know exist? Where, when and how might you work in the next decade and beyond? and Will there even be enough jobs for everyone in the future?
A really great discussion made better by lots of callers sharing their experiences, fears and thoughts.
Have a listen now (45 minutes) and then share this link and your thoughts on the Future of Work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What made the 2015 employment change signals particularly urgent?
The 2015 employment change signals were particularly significant because they represented a convergence of multiple simultaneous pressures: automation technology was becoming commercially deployable rather than merely theoretically feasible; artificial intelligence was advancing from narrow task-specific applications toward broader capability; global labour market competition was intensifying through digital work platforms; and the pace of occupational change was accelerating beyond the ability of education and training systems to anticipate and respond. The combination of these pressures meant that the occupational changes that previous technology transitions had spread over decades were compressing into shorter cycles — making the risk of being caught in a declining occupational category without time to transition more acute than in previous eras.
Q: Looking back from 2026, what actually happened to jobs between 2015 and 2025?
The employment trajectory between 2015 and 2025 was more complex than either the optimists or pessimists predicted: employment rates in most developed economies remained high through most of the period (confounding mass unemployment predictions); but the composition of employment changed significantly — administrative, routine processing, and middle-level professional roles contracted while care, trade, and senior professional roles grew; the COVID-19 shock caused the largest and fastest employment disruption in modern history, followed by the fastest recovery, but permanently accelerated the adoption of automation and digital services; and the emergence of large language models from 2022 has created a new wave of disruption that affects professional and knowledge work categories that previous automation had largely bypassed. The 2015 warnings about occupational change were directionally correct; the timeline and specific patterns were more complex than the models suggested.
Q: What is the most useful frame for individuals thinking about occupational resilience?
The most useful frame for occupational resilience is not ‘will my current job still exist?’ but ‘what capabilities am I developing that will be valued across multiple possible future employment contexts?’ This reframe matters because: the specific job title or occupational category is less important than the underlying capability set; many jobs that ‘disappear’ in one form reappear in a transformed form that requires similar but differently applied capabilities; and the workers who navigate occupational transitions most successfully are typically those who have been deliberately developing transferable capabilities rather than optimising exclusively for their current role. The practical corollary is that career development investment should be weighted toward capabilities that are either non-automatable (judgment, relationship, creativity, ethics) or that enable effective work with automated systems — not toward deeper specialisation in task areas that are on the automation trajectory.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a future of work, career resilience, or workforce strategy keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
I’m pretty certain that in 10 years you won’t have the job you have today, and why would you want to? In 2005 most people were using a Nokia phone, handling emails at their desk and believed social media, Facebook and LinkedIn were just a fad and of no possible use. Switch to 201.
The shift around Chances are you won’t have your job is not purely structural. It changes what capabilities organisations value, how people find meaning in their roles, and what conditions make good work possible. Leaders who understand this early retain the talent they need and build cultures that attract it.
The most important question is not whether Chances are you won’t have your job will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
