If you have ever wondered whether your job will still exist in ten years, you are not alone. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, released this week, puts a real number on that worry: as many as 11 million American workers may need to change occupations entirely by 2035 because of AI.

That headline sounds alarming on its own. But the full report, called “Workforce in Motion,” is actually more useful than scary once you read past the number. It tells you which jobs are shrinking, which are growing, which skills are suddenly worth a lot more, and who is most at risk of getting stuck. This post breaks down what McKinsey found and what it means for your own AI job transitions, whether you are years into a career or just starting one.

What McKinsey’s Report Actually Found

McKinsey estimates that automation could reduce demand for roughly 36 million US jobs over the next decade. At the same time, growth in the AI value chain and the wider economy could create demand for more than 40 million jobs. Net result: the US economy could end up with about 5 million more jobs than it has today, not fewer.

The catch is that the jobs disappearing and the jobs appearing are rarely the same jobs, or even in the same city. About 11 million workers, roughly 7 percent of the current workforce, may need to move into a completely different occupation. McKinsey says that works out to around 770,000 people switching occupational groups every year through 2035, which is more than three times the historical average. For comparison, that pace is close to what happened during the pandemic, when job switching briefly spiked in a similar way.

The steepest declines are concentrated in three areas: office and administrative support, retail and sales, and transportation and logistics. On the other side, healthcare support, construction, management, manufacturing, education, and IT roles are all projected to grow.

Why This Isn’t a “Robots Take All the Jobs” Story

McKinsey partner Anna Kortis summed it up well: this shift will happen faster and at a bigger scale than past transitions, but it is not mainly about jobs vanishing. It is about roles getting rebuilt. The report estimates that about 70 percent of workers will see their current role change in some way, even if they never switch job titles. Around a quarter of workers will see major task changes, more than 30 percent of their work hours shifting to new kinds of tasks, while most others will see smaller adjustments.

From my own experience working across websites, online tools, and cybersecurity over the past few years, this tracks with what I have actually seen happen. Very few of the tools I use today replaced a job outright. What they did was quietly change what the job involves, so the people who adapted fastest ended up doing more interesting work, not less work.

The Skills That Are Suddenly Worth More

One of the most useful parts of the report is a breakdown of which skills are becoming more valuable. McKinsey groups them into three buckets:

• Essential skills: problem-solving, leadership, communication, and attention to detail, which matter across almost every occupation.
• Enabling skills: decision-making, innovation, and critical thinking, which show up disproportionately in higher-paying roles.
• Empowering skills: AI fluency, adaptability, resilience, and curiosity, the traits that let someone keep learning as tools keep changing.

The report found that demand for AI fluency specifically has grown 11 times since 2022. Demand for adaptability is up fivefold. If you want one practical place to start, our guide to the AI skills that matter most for future jobs walks through how to build these without needing a technical background.

Tip: you don’t need to become a programmer to benefit from this shift. McKinsey’s own data shows the fastest-growing skill demand is for AI fluency and adaptability, not coding. Knowing how to use AI tools well in your own field counts.

Who Faces the Hardest Path

This is the part of the report that deserves more attention than it has gotten. The transition is not landing evenly. Lower-wage workers are 7.6 times more likely to need an occupational change than higher-wage workers. Workers without a bachelor’s degree are 1.8 times more likely, women are 1.6 times more likely, and younger workers face a 1.6 times higher likelihood than workers in their prime career years.

McKinsey sorts the 11 million transitioning workers into three types of paths. About 14 percent have a direct path, meaning they can move into a growing job with little retraining and no pay cut. Another 41 percent face a winding path, needing moderate retraining and possibly a temporary pay cut. The remaining 45 percent are on what the report calls an unpaved path: large skill gaps, and often a credential or certification requirement that takes real time to earn. In fact, roughly 85 percent of growing jobs now ask for some kind of credential, which is one of the biggest practical barriers workers actually run into.

This lines up with what we covered in our earlier look at the World Economic Forum’s four possible futures for AI and jobs by 2030: the outcome depends heavily on how much support workers get, not just on the technology itself.

What You Can Actually Do About It

You cannot control McKinsey’s projections, but you can control how ready you are. A few practical steps worth taking this month:

• Spend an hour looking honestly at which parts of your current job are repetitive and could shift to AI tools, and which parts genuinely need human judgment. The second group is where your value is growing.
• Pick one AI tool relevant to your field and actually use it on real work, not just a demo. Comfort matters more than mastery right now.
• If your field requires a credential to move up, look into free or low-cost options before paying for an expensive course. Our roadmap for learning AI for free is a good starting point.
• If you are actively job hunting, know which AI skills employers actually look for before you put them on paper. We broke that down in what AI skills on your CV are really worth.

None of this guarantees a smooth transition. But McKinsey’s own numbers show the difference between a direct path and an unpaved one usually comes down to preparation that starts months or years before you need it, not after.

Common Questions

Is this report saying AI will cause mass unemployment?
No. McKinsey actually projects a net gain of around 5 million jobs in the US by 2035. The concern is about the difficulty of moving between shrinking and growing occupations, not a shortage of jobs overall.

Which jobs are shrinking the fastest?
Office and administrative support, retail and sales, and transportation and logistics are seeing the steepest declines in demand, according to the report.

Which jobs are growing?
Healthcare support and professional roles, construction, management, manufacturing, education, and information technology are all projected to grow.

What is the single most useful skill to build right now?
McKinsey’s data points to AI fluency and adaptability as the fastest-growing in demand, and neither requires a technical degree to develop.

Final Takeaway

McKinsey’s report is one of the clearest pictures yet of what AI job transitions will actually look like this decade: not a wave of unemployment, but a much faster shuffle of who does what, with real winners and real people who get left on a harder path if they wait too long to start adapting. The most useful thing you can take from it is not the 11 million figure. It is the reminder that the workers with a direct path forward are usually the ones who started building AI fluency and adjacent skills before they needed to.