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As the world’s largest economic engine, the United States and its unemployment rate of 4.2% is low on a global basis, as the active global workforce declined by 4.15% last year compared with 2023.
If that seems to be a counterintuitive finding, here’s another: Even AI jobs are decreasing, and sharply, with a 15% year-over-year decline in 2024. In the U.S., though, the drop was less than half that great, at 7.2%.
The stats on disappearing AI jobs were particularly interesting, considering the source of the data: Aura, a provider of an AI-based workforce intelligence platform. The company, founded by Bain & Co. in 2020, recently released an benchmarking study comparing 10 industries, using its extensive workforce data collected from publicly available sources.
“While interest in AI remains high, hiring is increasingly concentrated in specific geographies and roles, reflecting maturing demand and budget constraints,” Aura wrote in its study report.
Unsurprisingly, the technology sector had the highest share of new AI postings globally (37.6%), followed by professional services (20.9%) and advanced manufacturing and services (10.7%).
The report pinned the overall workforce contraction on “cutbacks in major markets and declining labor participation in several sectors.” The bottom three industries, in terms of their share of new job postings globally, were energy, resources and utilities (1.8%), education (3.2%), and finance and investment (3.9%).
The top three were professional services, which accounted for the largest share of new jobs at 35%, despite a year-over-year decline of 19.6%, followed by advanced manufacturing and services (11.1%) and retail and consumer goods (11%).
The data indicated a small decline in female representation in the workforce, from 44.5% in 2023 to 44.4% last year. “Although the change is subtle, it reinforces the persistent gender imbalance in the global labor force, with diversity patterns still varying significantly across sectors,” Aura offered.
Women were most widely present in professional services (50%), the public sector (49%), and retail and consumer goods (47%). The industries with the fewest women were energy, resources and utilities (28%), advanced manufacturing and services (31%), and technology (34%).
Among leadership positions, 30.8% were held by women last year, which was unchanged from 2023.
Remote job postings fell by 20% vs. 2023, a second consecutive year of steep declines that underscored “a broad organizational shift back to in-office and hybrid models,” Aura wrote.
The United States had the greatest share of remote jobs globally, at 40.1%, a slight decrease from the previous year.
