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This past week, the World Economic Forum released its updated Chief People Officers’ (CPO) Outlook, a report that tracks shifts in sentiment on global labor market conditions by regularly surveying short-term expectations around talent availability and job creation among CPOs. The May 2026 edition (based on a survey of more than 140 global CPOs between January and March 2026) covers three areas: 1) an appraisal of global and regional labor market sentiment, 2) current workforce strategy trends with a particular focus on AI deployment, and 3) the workforce impact of increased geopolitical and geoeconomic fragmentation. One finding is that while half of the surveyed CPOs expect talent availability in their industry to improve over the next 12 months, there is significant variation across geographic regions, with stronger talent availability expectations in East Asia, China, and Europe, and more cautious outlooks in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America. When CPOs were asked which workforce and talent planning actions they will prioritize in the next 6–12 months in response to geoeconomic disruption, strengthening local talent pools through internal mobility and rapid redeployment capabilities ranked first, cited by 50% of respondents; this is one signal that organizations are increasingly looking at ways to redeploy internal talent more effectively rather than depending on an uncertain and uneven external labor market. With this in mind, I am resharing three of my cheat sheets designed to strengthen internal mobility. You can get all three of them in the Best of April 2026 issue of Talent Edge Weekly. See resource 9.
