McKinsey Says More Jobs Will Replace Lost Ones — But The Gatekeepers Are The Real Problem

(SeaPRwire) –   By: Robert Kensington

McKinsey painted a reassuring picture. AI will create more jobs by 2035 than it displaces. The headline number sounds generous. The story buried inside tells a different one.

Roughly 11 million Americans will need to leave shrinking occupations for entirely different work over the next decade. An average of 770,000 workers per year must cross occupational lines. That is 3.6 times the historical rate. The COVID-driven surge lasted one or two years. This one stretches at least ten. The difference matters. One is a shock. The other is a sustained grind that hits families, communities, and regional economies.

Consider the administrative assistant. Automation will claim 80 percent of the hours worked in that occupational group by 2035 — the largest projected losses. The pivot to project manager looks clean on paper. Planning, scheduling, coordination, documentation, stakeholder management — these tasks already fill about 58 percent of a project manager’s day. The skill gap is narrow. The wage gain is substantial. The credential wall is brutal. Most postings require a bachelor’s degree and a professional certificate. The worker can do the job. The question is whether they can spend thousands and years proving it.

Not all transitions work this way. A dishwasher moving into home health aide work — an occupation set to grow — carries only about 20 percent transferable skill. They would need training in patient assistance and vital-sign assessment plus a month of instruction for basic certification. Many employers want a nursing assistant credential instead, which takes longer. Nearly 92 percent of healthcare support jobs sit in the bottom two wage quintiles. The lifestyle uplift is minimal. A packager moving into production fabrication fares better. About 52 percent of their skills — lifting, quality control, forklift operation — transfer. No credential stands in the way. But mechanical assembly, drilling, fine motor work, and advanced quality-control procedures demand real training time. Short programs sound affordable on paper. They are not when wages stop flowing. A worker with modest savings or a child to care for cannot rationally choose a path that pays off in ten years if it requires months without income today.

Here is the part McKinsey understates. Credentials appear in 85 percent of growing jobs. Thirty-eight percent are mandated by law, concentrated where safety and public trust matter. The remaining 47 percent reflect employer preference — a degree, a certificate, or a job title. Nearly half the credential problem is hiring convention, not a safety rule. Conventions change. They just require someone willing to break them.

Employers hold the lever. A company laying off administrative staff in one division while posting project-coordinator openings in another has created its own talent shortage. Hiring on demonstrated skill, dropping degree screens no law requires, running practical assessments, building apprenticeships for existing workers — all of these cost less than hiring a credentialed outsider. The signaling is already clear. Since 2022, postings demanding AI fluency have risen elevenfold. Those seeking adaptability have quintupled. Requirements for resilience, curiosity, and willingness to learn have tripled. More than 70 percent of workers will need new skills even if they never change employers.

States can prune occupational licensing and make credentials modular and stackable. Colleges and training agencies can design programs backward from what growing occupations require and publish graduate earnings. Governments can offer subsidized education, individual tax incentives for retraining, and corporate breaks for helping workers attain skills and credentials. None of these actors can shorten a licensing timeline, self-fund a year without pay, or buy time on a fabrication line.

The McKinsey framing treats the transition as a retraining puzzle. It is not. It is a coordination problem between employers, educators, and policymakers. The workers already possess the skills. The blockers are institutional, not intellectual. Companies that drop unnecessary credential filters first will capture the talent others leave stranded. That is where the real edge sits.

Author bio: Robert Kensington is an overseas entrepreneurial veteran with decades of experience in real-economy industrial investment and expansion.