US chem employment to grow despite retirement wave – Deloitte

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (ICIS)–Employment in the US chemical industry will continue growing even while it contends with a wave of retirements, the consultancy Deloitte said.

CHEM EMPLOYEES NEEDED FOR GROWING INDUSTRY
The chemical industry grows at a multiple of GDP. As the global economy grows, so will the chemical industry, and that will require companies to hire employees, said Bob Kumpf, managing director at Deloitte.

“Society expects us to innovate, whether it’s emerging technologies, whether it’s biotechnology, whether it’s all the downstream applications,” Kumpf said. “This is a growth sector.”

Kumpf and others at Deloitte discussed a recent employment study by the consultancy during the annual meeting of the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

Even if the nature of growth in the chemical industry is changing, it is not stopping, he said. “There is no peak materials in any views that we have.”

While new technologies like AI and remote work are changing how people do their jobs, those technologies are not eliminating the need for labor.

The following chart summarizes Deloitte’s forecasts for US employment trends in the oil and gas (O&G) industry as well as in the chemicals industry.

Chemical companies will have to manage that growth in employment amid a wave of retirements. Deloitte expects that 20% of the current workforce will retire by 2030, said Kate Hardin, executive director at Deloitte.

Deloitte broke down management strategies into four pillars consisting of talent ownership, composition, capability and mobility.

TALENT OWNERSHIP
Chemical companies are relying on third-parties to manage digital upgrades and information technology services, while maintaining nearly 88% of its workforce as internal.

COMPOSITION
The study shows that chemical employment will rise in the following sectors:

• Site and plant workers
• Specialists and technicians
• Business support
• Customer engagement
• Leadership

Among site and plant workers in the energy and chemicals industry, Deloitte expects rising global demand, regulatory changes and infrastructure will contribute to rising demand for these employees.

For specialists and technicians, growth drivers are occupational health and safety, industrial engineers and material engineers. The study forecasts declines in chemical engineers.

In the past, those chemical engineers had left for jobs in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, Hardin said. More recently, they are going into software development.

For business support, employment growth will center around computer occupations, computer network architecture and training and development specialties.

Overall, automation, outsourcing and AI will reduce employment for some job types.

CAPABILITY
Deloitte expects generative and agentic AI to make employees more productive. The consultancy broke down AI’s effects on employment into human-in-the-loop tasks, human-enabled tasks and human-exclusive tasks.

For energy and chemical workhours as a whole, about one-third are expected to be human-in-the-loop tasks, in which machines and agentic AI lead the effort.

Another third will be human enabled, under which humans augment digital technologies.

The rest will be human exclusive, which covers tasks only people can do.

For some of these human-exclusive tasks, there could be prolonged vacancies, especially for occupations such as mechanics, repairers and vehicle operators, according to the study. These jobs have high turnover, and chemical companies will compete with construction and other industrial sectors for these workers.

MOBILITY
Digitization is making more skills common among industries and sectors, giving employees and employers a wider pool from which to choose. Some chemical jobs can be remote, but a robust on-site workforce remains essential for running chemical plants.

WORKFORCE AMONG FEW TOOLS CHEMS HAVE IN CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENT
Once more, chemical companies expect 2025 to be another challenging year in which they will need to look internally to increase revenue and profits. The overall economy will provide little – if any – help.

At the same time, trade policy is changing and conflicts among nations are growing, all of which is making it difficult to plan and forecast demand.

Workforce is one of the few areas chemical companies can control, and technology changes in AI and robotics are giving companies more options to reduce labor costs and increase productivity.

The ACC Annual Meeting ended on 4 June.