What is going on with the job market at the moment!

[scotchbonnetface]

100s of people applying for the same job. The salaries are abysmal and unless you have years of experience, you’ve got no chance of even being selected for interview.

There seems to be no middle ground of roles either. It’s either care work on minimum wage or senior such and such at £75k with minimum 5 years experience.

Luckily I have a job at the moment, but it’s a rocky industry and redundancy may be looming. In my 40s, I’m not sure I have it in me to retrain!

Even if I did have the energy, what sort of roles are even out there anymore?

Just needed a moan really

But it also went the other way a lot.

I deal with a lot of subcontract hauliers in the concrete industry. Most drivers get £16 p/h and overtime (usually after 10 hours in a day or 50 hours in a week, often at 1.5x hourly rate). Worst I'd seen previously was a day rate of £140 which was a small British Asian haulier mainly employing fairly recent immigrants who were often friends or family of current employees. The company also had a larger construction subsidiary and rented small apartments to said workers at a reduced rate so they got that benefit.

I then came across a medium sized haulier who seemed to only employ Romanians and they were getting £90 a day. Apparently they'd previously employed a lot of English drivers on £160 a day. All the other hauliers paid a '£50 per night' bonus to the drivers that slept in the truck Mon-Fri but this company didn't - it was just £90 a day with no overtime for doing 10-12 hours work (sometimes up to the legal limit of 15) and sleeping in truck Mon-Fri. The gaffer drove a Mercedes G Wagon.

For a few years this seemed to be getting more common but I've not encountered it in a good while.

It's been.. the same way for along time.
Too any people want employment.

Best to employ yourself if you can.

I'd be interested to see stats on whether previous generations were more or less likely to pick jobs they want to do vs picking jobs that are available. Obv appreciate they probs don't exist.

I notice that a lot of immigrants/ethnic minorities will go for jobs that are well paid with easy entry requirements. For example, I meet a lot of Indian/Muslim/Romanian truck drivers. Oddly a lot of the traffic martials and gate attendants at large civil sites seem to be African. However, most British people don't want to drive trucks.

There's been a lot of inconsistency and lack of control with immigration over the years, I have often thought that we've let people come in and fill roles that we don't have a shortage of people for. When I was made redundant last year and had to find more health and safety work, I live in an industrial part of the country and it was a nightmare when it came to applying for that kind of work in the factories because it was like walking into places where nearly everyone was from Central/Eastern Europe. Being interviewed all the time by these people for all the skilled compliance jobs I applied for was just a weird vibe, it felt like I was the wrong nationality to get a look in! And as much as I don't blame these people for building careers, I did feel like it's closed a lot of doors to British skilled professionals for no valid reason.

COVID is over! This country has always had flu and norovirus and it hasn't changed has it! My partner's aunt works in a residential care home and she's an absolute martyr to these bugs because of where she works! They get the bugs from work not the other way around, just the same as they are rife in schools in the winter! You don't abolish freedom of movement and all the hurt and damage it causes just for bog standard winter bugs that are here regardless? How can you even suggest that? And look what you've all swapped European Labour to? People from the wider world where there's a lot of far more dangerous diseases going about and far less vaccination against anything! Your logic is stupid beyond belief!

I read an article recently about how fresh graduates in the US are having a hard time finding jobs, because the type of entry level positions they would have got a few years ago are now being done by AI. I'm sure the situation is similar here.

I agree that AI is taking jobs right now and it's only going to get worse. Much worse. Yes, I know someone is going to be along soon saying 'Oh but other jobs will be created to replace the ones that are lost' but it's difficult to see where those jobs are going to come from. Soon enough we're going to have driverless vehicles, so that's another massive group of jobs eliminated. Few jobs will be safe from AI, however irreplaceable some might think they are.

Truck driving has become an unstable profession, a lot of haulage companies have gone bust in the last year because a lot of big industries have collapsed.

2 years ago my DD 54, went for a delivery driver for the same big supermarket where she was a manager during Covid, they said they weren't sure if she could lift the crates. She's 6 feet tall, size 14,, goes to the gym 3/4 times a week,used to lift very heavy items when she was managing,showed them physically, they gave the job to a small man!

Same is happening here.

Graduates fresh out of college can’t get jobs. The entry level positions and schemes they look for are disappearing fast. It no longer pays to have the traditional qualifications and start to work your way up the ladder as our parents and grandparents would have done.

I went to university but I won’t be encouraging my own children to go unless they desperately want to or want to become a surgeon/doctor/dentist or a profession where it is crucial.

And even then, AI is going to affect the medical profession too. It already is.

It's very strange to think that knowledge and expertise, which we have traditionally thought of as such valuable commodities, are soon going to be, if not worthless, then of much less value. I work in education and I wonder why students should be bothered to put so much effort into their studies when a world of knowledge is available with a few clicks.

AI is going to massively change our whole society in ways that would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago.

Totally agree. I’m an ex teacher and I’ve been saying this for years with the advent of just the internet. Knowledge is no longer the ‘skill’ it used to be.

The world of work for children today is unrecognizable. Previous generations could look at what their parents and grandparents did and replicate it via hard work and dedication. Today’s kids can’t do that. The road ahead is so unclear and even new territory. I home educate my children and we are prioritizing totally different skills to the traditional academic ones.

Which skills, out of interest?

It’s difficult to predict future trends, except to say their governments no longer work for the nations they’re supposed to represent. I see far too many areas of life where ‘knowledge no longer matters because it’s all on the computer’ where service is worse than it was because they just print out what’s on the internet. It’s certainly considered to be enough by employers and our treacherous government. The internet itself has to change though due to international conditions - I hope - and I’m starting to see monetary barriers going up, have done for a few years. There’s always been the question of how we fund the internet. AI is demanding huge increases in power and in water which simply cannot appear out of nowhere - the price we pay in terms of environmental damage is already high.

I'd have to respectfully disagree with this.

A lot of hauliers/owner operators go bump because the profit margins are small (especially on general haulage) and something like a new tyre can negate the truck's earnings for the day. The general opinion is that hauliers in the GH sector have driven the prices into the ground through a race to the bottom/undercutting each other - I couldn't possibly say whether this is the case.

However, as an actual driver you'll never be out of work. There's still an shortage even if it's not as dire as a few years ago. Previously, almost 50% of companies needed drivers whereas it's now just shy of 25%. The average age of driver has come down from 55 to 48, but it's still a comparatively old demographic and we'll see a lot retiring in the next decade.

Agencies are always looking for drivers and if you have specialisms (concrete, ADR, etc) you'll easily be able to jump from one company to another as you desire.

Maybe, it could more of an issue in my neck of woods because last from about September onwards we saw maybe 6 or more hauliers across the region go bust because a lot of their bread and butter was the local steel industries that have declined to barely existing now.

I think you might have it with your second sentence.

I saw a post on LinkedIn yesterday from a legal recruiter (I may have posted about this elsewhere on here yesterday evening). They said that they'd been asked to find a junior lawyer for a company legal team and then told they didn't need to because the team were going to use AI instead. Well how exactly do they think they'll get senior lawyers in future, if they won't train junior lawyers now?

Things like;

HOW to learn rather than what to learn. How to be adaptable, flexible and pivot. Also how to follow own interests into deep mastery.
Critical thinking skills, something AI doesn’t have as such. Questioning skills.
Practical life skills.
Financial literacy.
Coding and media literacy. Even though AI will be able to code, we will need more people who understand the systems and who can identify errors, biases and misinformation.
Problem solving.
Creativity. AI will be able to generate generic art, music etc but never will it replace original human work. My kids play music. Lots of music. They also draw and paint quite a bit. Teamwork and collaboration. Volunteering work.
Entrepreneurial skills. This will be crucial for a future in which more people won’t work for someone else as in the past. So we encourage things like lemonade stands, budgeting for a family trip/holidsy, selling items they’ve made etc. Looking for opportunities to make money etc.
Lastly, real life experiences. Knowing how to navigate the world in a meaningful way and having authentic social interactions rather than those fabricated in a school.

I’m currently recruiting - I didn’t think it was a niche role but we are struggling to fill it (not a bad salary either!)

I feel so bad as we have had lots of applicants but very few are the right skills fit. If we weren’t so busy and really need boots to hit the ground running I would take on someone who could upskill but we can’t risk that. We’ve lost a number of second interviews to either then getting another job or because expectations is minimal 3 days in the office - we not city based but accessible from London and motorways.

There seems to be an increasing reliance on AI! I'm health and safety for a living and don't see how AI could be ever be trusted when it isn't human and won't take into account human factors. How can AI be trusted to take everything into account as a lawyer dealing with humans! Can AI tell if someone is lying or decide on appropriate lines of questioning in response to something in a court room. I have visions of a lot of organisations getting into real trouble because of trusting everything to AI.

To give a few examples, I have a neighbour who works on a long term agency contract delivering alcohol to hotels/pubs etc. He gets paid £20 p/h (£200 a day) so is making over £50k a year when including overtime. It's a piss easy job as he only drives a little 10T puddle jumper which is much easier than manoeuvring a 65ft arctic around the city centre or driving a top heavy vehicle off road like mixer drivers do (who also need to know a fair bit of technical stuff about the mix). He only goes to a handful of places so there's no navigation involved and mainly offloads bottles using a little trolley.

Another mate of mine is earning between £60-65k on the fuel tankers. He spent a year working for a big waste haulier on the industrial skip trucks (32T) and then got his class one license. He immediately got in with an agency working for people like DPD/Amazon and was on £20 something an hour with a higher rate after eight hours. He was making over £50k a little over a year after getting his license, which isn't bad considering you can now go straight to your Class 1 license and get it in a few days training for a few grand. He now works 4 on/4 off so effectively has six months off a year whilst earning over £60k.

I worked on the concrete mixers for a bit and you can earn good money with the right company. I've been helping out on the night shift at HS2 lately. We get 9.5 hours guaranteed at £21 (more if we work longer, which never happens) and a £150 bonus - so around £350. We start at 7pm and are done between 11:30 and 1am, so between 4.5-6 hours work. And we get Friday off as a paid rest day to get back into day sleeping pattern, which isn't too hard as I'm usually in bed between 1-2am on nights. I love it!

I worked bank holiday and it was £32 p/h with a £200 bonus for day shift and £300 for night. I agreed to do first two night shifts and be on standby for an extra three hours as knew nothing would actually be done. Did 12 hours each day, made just shy of £700 for each of the shifts, and only did about an hour's work over those entire two days as they couldn't get the mix right and ended up finishing it on the Sunday/Monday instead. Just napped in the bunk and watched films lol. And got a fully paid rest day off before and after the BH due to losing my weekly rest I'd usually have on the weekend.

I do of course have my crap days where things break down and it turns into 13 hrs, but at least I get overtime unlike when I was doing all nighters in my office job trying to get bids finished before the deadline. It's not for everyone but a lot of people have no idea what's out there. There are crap low paid jobs out there but that's the same in most industries. Now I'm being trained up as a plant manager which I'm really keen on.

The whole thing is a mess.

Advertising a role and people asking for 30%+ more salary, when the salary advertised is already above a competitive benchmark.

An expectation of WFH from nearly every candidate, when the job isnt suitable at all for WFH.

People who dont reply, people who dont turn up for interview, people who do turn up and appear to have no concept of what an interview is.....

Having a compensation budget (I work for a company, not self-employed) that is in the red due to the NI/Tax hikes. That money didnt just appear in budgets from thin air when the Chancellor decided it.

Having to deal with hundreds of almost indentical CVs when the bots find your vacancy online. I got 200+ applications overnight not that long ago.

Headcount reductions in almost every department. Which means there isnt a recruitment advisor who can give a vacancy the attention it needs. Revewing CVs, checking rights to work, co-ordinating interviews etc all take a huge amount of effort and we have less and less experienced people to do that.

Yeah, that sounds like general haulage. If you get into construction there's a lot of good roles out there. I was talking to a young lad of about 23-24 who currently works as a slinger (guides the tower crane over walkie talkie). He's earning well into the £40k's but has just got his crane license and is moving up north for a £53k crane job.

Young guy with no student loan and over £50k salary is pretty decent IMO. There are loads of jobs like that. One of our drivers is 28yo and on about £45k. Nobody else in his immediate family works and he was kicked out by his parents as soon as they couldn't claim allowance for him - lived in hostels/council accommodation for years, cycling 12 miles to work in a warehouse to eventually get his driving license which enabled him to get better paid work and then his HGV license.

See to me that's a ridiculous salary for a slinger, I'm a H&S advisor and my partner is a senior network engineer for a hospital trust and we earn about 70k between us for very responsible jobs. It sets people up for a fall because if they lose a job they may not find anything paying anywhere near that kind of money and that would screw him over if he's got finance on a flash car and a big mortgage and suddenly he's only got work offers earning half that.

I worked for a steel plant that shut down last year taking all of our jobs with it and guys in £50 to £60k a year engineering and management roles ended up in minimum wage jobs like working in a garden centre, taking new cars off ships etc.

I do wish there was better equality in salaries I this country rather that situations were some people deserve much more whilst some people are really overpaid.

Yes, but he has the risk of killing somebody or getting killed himself by giving one wrong instruction. And unlike most office staff he'll inevitably be doing some 12 hr days out in the rain or baking sun when things don't go to plan and the job drags out. He still has to be on the ball to the very last second of that day.

It's very unlikely he'd be out of a job because construction is one thing that will always happen. It's also much easier to switch between roles IME. I got my HGV licence in four days. I moved into the construction sector and opted to do loads of courses but they were paid for by my employers and I was paid for attending.

Now I'm learning plant management but they're also putting me through the front end loader ticket next week as it's a useful skill to have. That's another career option I'll have if I fancy a change or don't enjoy the management side. And there's always work on the mixers too. Unlike HGV licences it'll cover me for any front end loader right up to the huge 266 ton quarry ones.

No offence, but people in offices always seem to think they deserve to be paid more but nobody forced them to choose the job they did. I did a 13.5 hr day on Tuesday, had an hour before bed when I got in, and then did 12 hours yesterday and 11 today.

It's not always like that but when it's busy it can be non stop and you still need to able to reverse up to within inches of a pump every single time without hitting it. If you do the whole pour stops and thousands of pounds are lost. It's not just about whether you can do it. It's about whether you can do it for 12 hours three days in a row when required and still do it perfectly every single time even when you're soaking wet, tired, and it's 7pm.

@PregnantBarbie it sounds like a tough role, you deserve the pay. When self driving vehicles come in though I wonder if they will be safer and more appealing to employers for the very reasons you mention - they don’t get tired or care what the weather is?

Thanks! 🙏

I'll likely be retired before they have self driving heavy plant (if they ever do) and I say that as somebody that's still fairly young. There's just too many variables and judgement required to automate it anytime soon.

The general belief seems to be that self driving lorries will be almost like trains, travelling in convoy with a human operated lead truck at the front. They'll almost certainly travel on set routes which will likely be main trunking roads.

If we take concrete trucks as an example, there's a lot of judgement involved. You have a two hour window to get most loads off and that's affected by the ambient temperature and ad mixtures. Once tipped you need to get back and wash out before the residue sets in the drum. So you have to consider dynamic things like traffic and road closures etc.

There can be a lot of back and forth with the shipping team and the customer often has to agree to pay surcharges etc if they want us to stay outside the agreed window - which they usually strop about. Usually the driver is collating the info and relaying it back and sometimes looking for alternate solutions like "OK, why don't we fill that other bit now and the next load can go here once you've cleared that collapsed section, because this'll be out of spec soon and I'll have to dump it and you'll be charged anyway" etc.

So an automated truck would almost certainly require human monitoring, so you've now got somebody doing a job which would usually be done by the driver. Granted, one planner could manage several trucks remotely but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You need to assess ground conditions and whether you'll get stuck/roll over - you can't trust the builders to do this. And it's common to damage tyres etc when on sites where there could be bits of metal sticking out the ground etc. This creates a liability/safety issue because it'd be hard to implement a self diagnostic system advanced enough to cover all possibilities.

If they want to wet it up you'll need a signature from somebody with the authority to sign off on something which will compromise the structural integrity - the concrete guys will happily try and blag you into turning it into pea soup because it's easier for them to work with and it's not their business that'll be liable when it collapses in 20 years time like we've seen with all those schools.

And then there's daft things like doing a remote drop and somebody forgetting to tell you where they left the key - the truck won't be able to check under that brick by the gate post etc. That's just scratching the surface. But absolutely we'll probably see autonomous artics trundling down the motorway in our lifetimes.