AIBU to think redundancy crisis is not getting enough media coverage?

They don’t know is exactly the right phrase.

Here’s a gif for them for when they or their partner gets made redundant in the next six months.

I sort of agree with you. I’m 64 and financially ok. But, I’m bored witless. I don’t want to work in a charity shop sorting through dirty clothes. The gym is full of groups of chatterboxes, a lot of daytime interest groups are mainly much older people. I don’t have a paid job, but I can see why others my age or older do continue working. Maybe it’s not fair on younger people who need the work/money but older people have skills that younger people don’t have and don’t want to develop.

A personal crisis can often feel like a crisis per se

It's a mismatch of skills. Too many graduates in the "wrong" subjects and too few applicants for jobs that are in demand due to not having the right experience/skills.

I've been talking to other accountancy practices over the past year. All say the same that they simply can't recruit. They're all taking on trainees (school leavers and graduates) but there's a limit to how many they can train as it detracts from the productivity of the experienced staff (who they're short of) who have to train/supervise/manage them. They're basically always recruiting but really struggle to get applicants of the right experience. If it was one firm, you could just blame the firm, but when it's literally every firm I spoke to, you know there's a problem. I believe it's similar in engineering.

I can see this. People always talk about graduate unemployment but seem to forget that graduate don’t have any skills. They only have education. They aren’t particularly useful in the workplace, but they are future talent so worth investing in.

but then, what’s changed? Graduates can’t have the “wrong” skills and are really no different to the school leavers in term of the need to train

One aspect of redundancy that I havent seen spoken about much, is how persistent the negative effects are. Ive been made redundant twice, and each time although I got a generous payout, it took me a look time to find my next job. It makes massive inroads into your financial stability, which takes you a very long time to recover from, even once you have income coming in again. I would say I recovered financially from my one redundancy, but not from the other - it left a financial hole that is still empty even though life is returning to 'normal'. Its a huge and growing problem.

This is so true.

Where do accountancy firms expect people to get experience from? The ether?

The perpetual moaning of industry is always “we need people with experience. We won’t give people experience no but some other company should so we get the benefit without any cost”.

Economically inactive is a measure of those between 16 and 64 who are not in work or not capable of being in work. This includes those not in work for reasons like education but also all those on benefits that don't require availability for work. It's a much better measure of what is going on with employment than raw unemployment stats which were manipulated to take out certain benefit claimants in the 1980s and since then.
It stands at 20.9 percent. This continually fell up to 2020 due to increased education attendance and increased women in the workforce. It is now increasing quite dramatically due to long-term illness (disability benefit) and early retirement (pushed by redundancy) and students staying in education longer (pressure to get higher qualifications) and an often overlooked, but important factor, of people (no surprise, it's mostly women) leaving the workforce for caring needs as parents and relatives live longer and need complex care. But, as of last year, the National Stats Office is not saying large scale redundancy across the workforce is a factor in increase of Economically Inactivity. Interestingly it's only up to 64 years old, which is going to have to be changed to 67 at some stage.

I am in engineering.

In the past schools/colleges didn't really bother with any kind of electronics manufacturing skills because there were a few huge companies in the UK who churned out apprentices. There were enough that didn't make the grade in those large companies to fill the needs of all the smaller companies.

Those big businesses no longer exist, or no longer have the funds to manage huge apprenticeship programs. The industry is now made up of many, many smaller more specialist companies (95% of businesses in our industry in the uk are SMEs with under 50 employees) They will sub-contract many of the different skills to other small specialist companies rather than having everything under one roof.

Most of the SMEs do not have the skills, capacity, funds to provide training and if they did, it is so specialized it is not very transferable compared to the wider industry apprenticeship they could have gotten years ago.

The decline in industry based training has been happening since probably the 90s and nobody was able to pick up the slack in the industry and colleges did not offer programs either. So the skills shortage has been getting worse for decades. We are now getting to crunch point, where the old apprentices from the good old days are retiring and nobody new has come through.

I know many people in the industry have been trying to find ways to improve the situation. Working with local colleges, trying to make apprenticeships where trainees can have placements with different companies within the area all with different skills that can build into a full industry apprenticeship. Local councils have tried. But so far nothing has succeeded. Small businesses do not have large training budgets, and spare people to try to build who new collaborative ways of training.

So we take on youngsters with no experience and try to train in house. But we are generally doing them an injustice, as we can offer no qualifications and a very limited skill set based on what we do specifically not what the whole industry does.

I understand the frustration of it being difficult to gain experience, but providing training and experience is incredibly difficult and expensive and SMEs struggle to do that properly, so often default to experience needed. Even a week long work experience can show a noticeable cost in the balance sheet of a SME as production is affected by having to focus on the experience child. I also know the come back from that is that if that' the case the business must be a poor one. I would agree, if it were not the same experience across the entire industry. Money is simply tight, taxes, wages, utility bills, everything has gone up. Customers have the same issue, so they want us to decrease our prices, all while we are finding it more expensive to run.

Maybe, as AI takes over the functions it can, we will start valuing other areas more. Maybe people who take on caring responsibilities and save the State thousands of pounds will be valued and even rewarded for it, for example. Maybe this is the start of a societal shift where the 'knowledge' based jobs can be done by machines and the real rewards are for functions that cement society together. Like any revolution, it's going be painful and messy.
As Carnation said at the Galway Arts Festival. 'The revolution is coming and I have nothing to ware'

There are an awful lot of voluntary early retirees too. I'm 54 and most of our peers are retired or looking at retirement soon. A lot still 'work' a couple of days a month in an advisory capacity or as a non-exec. Or have hobby jobs where the income isn't important. We'll be joining them as soon as youngest goes to university (3 years). Need to set a good example while he is still at school!

I have family and friends who work there who are currently at risk of losing their jobs.

Not sure why I'm bothering with you as you haven't responded to a number of responses, @kwikfitt.

Why should they be retired? Are they stacking wrongly? A bit wrinkly?

What's your reasoning?

Oh, hang on, you said "all the staff", so your assertion is based on fuck all because you don't know "all the staff".

Sorted.

I have stayed on past normal retirement age - I retired but was asked to go back to the job. It is a very highly specialised area and quite a few people had left, got promoted or went on maternity leave at the same time so I was needed to cover the gap until the new people were trained.

Small businesses do not need to register redundancies as t1 only required for 20+ roles being reduced.

There's a limit to how many trainees any business can take on at the same time. Not only is there the cost of wages, training courses, etc., but also the cost of lost productivity of the other staff having to train/supervise/manage them. As I said, all the firms I talked to do already take on school leavers and graduates and can't take on any more. But it's not enough to replace the more experienced staff who retire, change careers or reduce to part time working (or leave) due to having children.

A better option would be for Unis to actually do specific courses for, say, Chartered Accountancy where their courses/modules are specific to professional exams to gain exemptions, etc. That way, the period of further studying/exams after leaving Uni would be reduced, costs of training courses would be reduced, and the graduates would be better places (in terms of training) to hit the ground running. A degree in accountancy does make someone an accountant, not even close, and such graduates usually do exactly the same "on the job" training as school leavers!!

Unis need to do fewer "general" degrees and more job/career/profession specific courses. That would really make a massive difference to employers who could then take on graduates ready to hit the ground running, whether in engineering, accountancy, law, or any other number of professions.

I mean, by defintion, the army has to split for it to qualify as a civil war. Otherwise its a failed uprising or successful coup.
/pedantry.

Anyway I got made redundant from an academic post in May and just started a related new role in the third sector which I'm really happy in so far, pretty much all remote, flexible and using my skills and interests. Pay is less but I've been aggressively overpaying on my flat whilst in my last highly paid post so its fine for me. However, the job market is the worst I've ever seen it. Loads of fake jobs, ghosting, ghosting after interview, multiple interview rounds, senior responsibilities for entry level salaries, postings that are three confused jobs smushed into one description, rampant AI slop (on both sides). I also looked into ditching my career oath and just getting "any job" - equally difficult if not moreso.

I feel incredibly sorry for students graduating into this. I said years ago that I could no longer in good conscience recommend anyone in the UK do a PhD unless it was employer sponsored with a guaranteed job or promotion at the end. I'm starting to feel the same way about (a lot of) degrees. But if you ask me what I'd advise a 16-18 year old to do right now, I have no idea, beyond 'Do not outsource either writing or thinking to AI'. AI is not very good at either of those things, and when the bubble bursts the people with the biggest advantage in any sector will be those who haven't totally atrophied their brains.

I don’t think this contributes at all (fellow accountant here) the majority of finance and business degrees do indeed offer exemptions from chartered qualifications, but the degrees are only mildly helpful in actually working in accountancy.
And as you will be aware, the more elite accountancy training firms far prefer more academically rigorous degrees than accountancy /business /finance

It's not about being "thick" though. I think the OP's point is that there's a hidden crisis in the world of work that isn't necessarily apparent in the visible data. I've been laid off twice in the last couple of years at the end of fixed-term contracts that would have been renewed routinely back in the day. I was technically self-employed and continued to be for a while after the last one ended but have been under-employed for some time now as my field (in which I was highly skilled, experienced and connected for 30-odd years) is being trashed by a combination of AI and time-honoured belt-tightening. I didn't sign on as my (modest) savings meant it wouldn't do me any good. I'm in my 50s and not in a position to not earn so I'm taking a deep breath and retraining completely, despite health problems and generally feeling like I could do with packing it all in to be frank. There will be no sign of me in any statistics whatsoever, but that doesn't mean that I'm not on the shitty end of a stick that's walloping a lot more of us than in previous generations. I do also feel for the school leavers and new graduates but at least they still have some energy, unlike those of us who thought we might just about get to the finish line unscathed.

I don't know. I am not in the UK but have a similar regulation, companies brining in skilled workers, which might mean a cook or fast food manager, have to provide a good wage. So you see them run an ad for $37 per hour for a cook, and then they don't find anyone, which if course is dodgy, and they get permission to hire from abroad.

What really happens is they write the requirements in a way that makes it unlikely anyone can fill them, and then the wages are a scam as well. The employee never sees that.

Yes. It's absolutely a crisis but not enough people are informed. Companies getting rid of staff presumably based on technology taking over but in reality the technology is not necessarily making things easier, the employees left are picking up the slack/burnt out, and the level of customer service/quality of products are suffering however companies do not care, they just care about profit. So many people out of work, at a time when people in full time jobs struggle to pay for necessities...I am so stressed in my job at the moment but powering through as really working in the background to make ourselves as self sufficient as possible in terms of energy and food needs (already mortgage free -early/mid 40's). I don't think people have a clue of what's to come...

I am sorry but this is not a consequence of Brexit necessarily. Plus unemployment is lower in the UK vs most European countries that remained in the EU
Some figures here:
Overall Unemployment ComparisonsUK Rate: The UK harmonised unemployment rate was 5.0% in early 2026.EU/Eurozone Rates: The broader Eurozone unemployment rate averaged 6.3%, with the wider EU average sitting around 5.9%.Lower European Countries: Nations like Germany (3.8%), Czechia, and Poland have lower unemployment rates than the UK.Higher European Countries: Nations like France (8.1%), Finland (10.4%), and Spain (10.3%) have significantly higher unemployment rates than the UK

I mean, by defintion, the army has to split for it to qualify as a civil war. Otherwise its a failed uprising or successful coup.
/pedantry

@iloveeverykindofcat no, not pedantry - excellent definition, thank you.