Welcome to 2025! Trends to watch in APAC.

Welcome to the very first edition for 2025! Here's some global trends to watch for the upcoming year, and what they mean for APAC.

(1) The labour market is coming out of low gear, more business expansion and job changing activity expected.

2024 was a juxtaposition of economic recovery but sluggish labour market movement. Even as GDP picked up, hiring and job-changing activity remained low. This means that the balance between talent supply and demand rebalanced in 2024 and the labour market is now poised to recover in 2025. We expect workers to start searching for and changing jobs more actively, while hiring will also pick up as businesses expand operations. In particular, business expansion activity into APAC is expected to continue growing.

(2) AI's effect on business transformation will begin to take shape, AI literacy will start to become as commonplace as digital literacy.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, there has been much buzz about AI. The past two years have been filled with exciting new developments, and many workers even started bringing their own AI tools to work (BYOAI). But we've now come to the hard part of any tech disruption: moving past experimentation to business transformation. And 2025 will be the year where businesses truly begin to use AI in organisation-wide, transformative ways. AI literacy will start to become as commonplace as digital literacy. In APAC, many countries already have high penetration of AI skills in the workforce, and are well-positioned to benefit from this transformation.

(3) Rise of the multi-generation workforce will bring some challenges, but even more opportunities.

For the first time in decades, there will be 4 generations co-existing together in the workforce in the coming years. Although multigenerational teams are nothing new, 2025 will highlight many of the challenges and opportunities that multigenerational teams can bring - LinkedIn's Work Change Snapshot found that navigating multigenerational teams with different working styles is a common challenge faced by professionals, and helping multigenerational teams to succeed together is a top priority for executives. Each generation brings different strengths, and there is opportunity to capitalise and build synergy to create a stronger and more resilient workforce overall. Understanding these nuances will be even more critical in APAC, which has countries at both ends of the age spectrum - countries with young workforces such as India and Indonesia, and the likes of Japan and South Korea with aging populations.