Display user role Name – not slug

WordPress does not (currently) have a global function (e.g. get_role_name()) for getting the role name (e.g. Shop Manager for shop-manager or maybe shop_manager etc.), but you can easily get (and then display) it like so:

$role="shop-manager"; // the role slug; it's up to you how to get the value..

$role_name = $role ? wp_roles()->get_names()[ $role ] : '';
/* Or directly access WP_Roles::$role_names:
$role_name = $role ? wp_roles()->role_names[ $role ] : '';
*/

echo $role_name;

References: wp_roles() and the WP_Roles class.

Some Additional Notes

1. Be careful when using array_shift() – it does return the value but also removes the original item from the source array, so in your case, the next time you access $current_user->roles, it would be empty or no longer contains the user’s role.

2. Just as with the current post where it’s a better practice to access the post object/data using get_post(), it’s also recommended to use wp_get_current_user() to get the current user object/data instead of relying upon the global $current_user variable.

   And if your code runs only if the current user is authenticated/logged-in, then a shortcut for getting the user role is $role = wp_get_current_user()->roles[0]; 🙂

PS: Big thanks to @WacławJacek for his helpful comment! =)