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If 2025 is anything like the past few years for the job market, one thing is for certain: big changes are ahead.
In a few short years, the job market has seen massive upheavals, from the pandemic-era layoffs to the hiring frenzy that followed, the rise of work-from-home, to the surge of immigration, and the advent of large language model software marketed as “artificial intelligence.” And the year ahead could bring further changes.
Investopedia spoke with Cory Stahle, an economist at job search site Indeed, about the trends that will shape the job market in 2025. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
INVESTOPEDIA: What trends are you seeing in job postings that are not being picked up in the official surveys of the labor market?
CORY STAHLE: There’s been a lot of discussion about generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market, but where we sit at Indeed, we’ve had kind of an interesting perspective.
We’re able to look at job postings that are asking for generative AI skills. The impact is still pretty minor on the labor market. We’re only seeing about 2 in every 1,000 jobs asking for Gen AI skills. There’s a lot of promise behind these tools, but the actual adoption of the technologies still has a long way to go.
We’ve seen a lot of interesting data on our platform around flexibility. We’ve seen a rise in employers taking more skills-based hiring approaches. We’ve seen fewer job postings requiring experience. We’ve seen fewer job postings requiring education, and we’ve also seen employers raising mentions of benefits and pay transparency in job postings as well.
INVESTOPEDIA: What do you think is driving that trend of increased flexibility?
CORY STAHLE: On one level, the thing that’s driving that trend of increased flexibility is worker demand for it.
We’ve seen that, especially for things like remote work, there are many workers who still would like hybrid or remote work options. And so, in a labor market where it still can be difficult to find workers, being able to provide hybrid or remote work options can give employers a leg up in the market.
There’s also the labor market side of things as well. Even though the labor market has cooled over the last couple of years, this labor market, especially in some areas, is still pretty tight.
We’ve seen knowledge worker jobs kind of fall off: your traditional office jobs, like software developing, marketing, those types of jobs. Employer demand has cooled pretty dramatically.
But in areas like construction and manufacturing and some of these more skilled labor jobs, we’ve seen that there’s still really strong employer demand and much more demand than we saw even before the pandemic.
INVESTOPEDIA: Going back to AI, it doesn’t sound like AI is going to take everyone’s job yet, but what about in the coming year? Is it increasing a lot? What do you see happening with that in 2025?
