Workplace Trends in 2025: What's Ahead for the World of Work (Part One)

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When we look back at the world of work a year from now, what will we wish we had anticipated? Without a doubt, the year ahead will bring new technology, evolving employee expectations, and the ongoing consequences of political and global events. For my team and I, our mission is to contribute to the growth of remarkable organizations. Remarkable organizations by definition, (we love a good operational definition) are exceptional and worthy of note.? They demonstrate that by earning the attention and trust of their stakeholders, both within the organization (employees) and beyond (customers, shareholders, the community). And that happens through hiring and developing the right people and building a strong and thriving culture.

Now, many organizations capture attention at one moment in time, but remaining remarkable takes intention and intense effort. That's where we contribute: looking ahead to build resonant solutions and provide guidance to foster the team and culture that sustains the remarkable.

The year ahead presents a broad range of challenges and opportunities, ranging from the highly technical to the most human. I'll share how AI is shaking up jobs and hiring, the growing challenge of employee disengagement, the increasing need for skill development and frequently overlooked soft skills, childcare and flexibility, and the move towards human-centric work design,. Along the way, I'll sprinkle in the science of industrial-organizational psychology to give you a well-rounded understanding of these trends. I've also included relevant videos from the past couple of years.

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash

1. AI Evolution in Jobs and Hiring

No surprise here, artificial intelligence continues to transform the nature of work and talent acquisition in particular. This will influence both who and how we hire and how we deploy proven systems like structured interviewing and hiring assessment tools.

Early signals point to a significant?reduction in job demand for positions ripe for automation.? ?AI continues to transform roles and tasks that we long thought required human input, from writing and customer service to coding, graphic design, and engineering. Anyone who uses these tools, (see me emphatically raising my hand here) can point to clear opportunities for improvement, but AI has evolved to become a meaningful partner in idea generation as well as the completion of route tasks.?

We can't overlook the influence of artificial intelligence technologies on employee attitudes. About a third of the workforce are concerned that their jobs could be eliminated, or at least significantly changed, because of AI technology. This represents a need for leadership to step up to address these concerns, and also an opportunity to transform concern into employee motivation to grow and embrace the change this new technology brings.

Within people and culture, AI will continue to transform not just how we work but who we work with. This year saw an even stronger contribution of AI to recruitment that we'll continue to see in the year ahead. Conversational chatbots gained ground and AI-driven tools, like agents, are now core to recruitment processes, from parsing resumes to highlighting candidates for job openings using skills-based criteria. This unites AI with the movement to shift away from cursory judgements based on credentials and years of experience and supports a focus on finding candidates with the greatest skill for the position.? We've also seen AI recruiting agents increase the size and strength of applicant pools, providing opportunity to a greater proportion of the workforce. In 2025 we expect to see AI accelerating skill-based promotions and internal hiring. On the flip side, I expect we'll see continued pushback and questions about the validity and bias of AI assisting tools in hiring. This delivers much needed support for organizations needing to fill gaps with their own talent and apply skill-based decision-making to internal growth.

Connect with us to learn how we apply AI and tech to assessments and hiring.

?Competencies and Job Redesign?

Lastly, the investment we need to make in learning and development so the workforce can work effectively alongside AI technology easily gets lost in the conversation. If we're automating routine work we expect to see a rise in job redesign, a re-engineering of competencies, and a focus on how we can reskill to prepare for a future that's different than what we expected five years ago.

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By automating routine tasks, employees can focus on more strategic and creative work.?

This could lead to a much-needed increase in engagement and meaningful work for many touched by AI. For instance, AI scribes are allowing healthcare providers to devote their full attention to patients, rather than being distracted by computers and lessening the charting load they carry. Even in the business world, AI note-taking during meetings can foster deeper connections and relieve employees of burdensome administrative tasks.

But this means we need to prepare people in these roles with the knowledge and direction to deliver. This transformation requires a significant commitment to upskilling and reskilling employees to ensure they can work effectively alongside AI technologies. The change management and skills that AI transformation requires leads to our next key trend for year ahead: upskilling.

Read ahead to all of our 2025 trends here.

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