This country as gone into terminal decline

[Carmes]

I have 2 young children in school.

I am becoming more and more anxious about what sort of jobs / careers they will have open to them.

I work for very large company with 10,000s of employees.

20 years ago whe I started work here there would be 100s of entry level jobs at any given time. These are jobs that don't require experience or a degree, ideal for a school leaver, and I know dozens of people who started their career this way.

Now there are maybe 10 jobs that would fit the same criteria.so. All the jobs have been offshored.
Now are the vacancies are for very specific technical skill set or experience.

This doesn't bode well for someone who has left school at 18'or even university.

I think we need to encourage bright young people to take up a trade rather than go to Uni. My plumber/gas heating engineer is in his 30s, he's a typical working class bloke and a grafter. We live in the sticks nearly 100 miles from London. He gets £1k a day for working on sites in London but he prefers to work local. He can never park near his site in London, how can he fit a boiler when he can't park and get access to his tools? He says he spends ages driving around to try and park, is frequently moving his van and he has to pay the congestion charge too.

I fear this too. I did an apprenticeship and I find that to be the best way to learn a skill. On the job training so you get experience while you learn. As a lot of companies prefer experience as well as qualifications.

If I was a young person now, I’d be reading everything I could about the predicted impact of AI and choose my career accordingly. I’d probably go for plumbing.

https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3806308?ln=en&v=pdf#files
Link to UN's damning report about the UK in 2018. Follow up reports have not been glowing.
We are one of the world's largest economies yet we have food and job insecurity, lack of access to basic healthcare, reliance on food banks, proliferation of payday loans, a housing crisis.
So yes, I'd agree. The UK is not a great place to live and I blame successive governments.
We do have a little bit of power ourselves. We can support our local economy by shopping in our high streets. We can lobby our MPs for proper debate on these issues in parliament. We can lobby our employers to provide decent apprenticeships. Slim pickings but important that we all do what we can.

@LutherVandrossessuit

That’s all hunky dory if you want to be a plumber or an electrician but not everyone can or wants to do that?

I am tired of “get a job as a plumber or electrician” being presented as the silver bullet answer to every problem.

What about kids whose skills and interests lie in the knowledge or creative skills. People are talking as if they have no right to be employed.

The UK had historically been very strong in these areas. If we disincentivize kids from working in these industries because everyone should be a plumber or electrician we are doing them and our economy a massive disservice.

There will be new and different ways to work tho. Some of the ways people earn money now weren't in existence a relatively short time ago. Be positive. Many young people are choosing not to own lots of stuff, they move around, there are new workspace/ live space apartments , they travel, work online.

Not every job is able to be done by tapping a laptop. The food has to be grown, harvested and processed. Your house goes on fire you need a real fire fighter. Your child needs a real person in daycare or are you happy for a robot to nurse them?

The benefits bill for the UK is staggering. It seems almost everyone claims benefits even those in full time work.

majority of the benefits is the state pension, the issue is the changing demographics. There is also the lack of social housing which means more is paid out in housing benefit.

@Bushmillsbabe My DS is in his final year of a degree apprenticeship with a guaranteed job. The hours are horrendous though and it is night and day compared to University in the traditional sense. I am glad though as no student debt.

@caringcarer Agree with you. If you get down to the nitty gritty part of the issue is people surviving too much. I don’t just mean in old age. Survival of the fittest has been skewed by modern medicine. It’s unpalatable isn’t.

More likely to be the degree needing, white collar jobs that disappear.

@relecat Too many non working people being propped up by a shrinking workforce that’s taxed to an inch of its life.

Nail on the head

More and more food is cheaply imported from other countries. Becoming a fire fighter has always been very competitive and hopefully isn't a growth area. Daycare for a baby probably costs £1500 a month now and will only increase so less and less people will be able to afford it / work.

There is a really simple formula to being a successful nation financially, as old as time itself.

You have to take something, lets say a lump of coal and a lump of hematite, and from that make something else, lets say a shovel - by doing that you add value to that raw ingredient. or you can just grow or extract that raw ingredient and sell it in bulk to a third party

Then you must sell that good to someone else, outside of your financial system, hence bringing wealth into your system.

Around that you have to set up support structures, sales, insurance, pensions, banking, HR, Law to serve the primary function, but they must never cost so much as to erode the principal margin.

That way a successful economy grows, its how we, and many western nations became rich - however, we lost sight of the core business, thought of it as grubby and gave it away thinking the service structures would be enough - no surprise the countries that took over the "making" element are on the ascendent and we are in decline.

Slowly the "service" elements will follow, they are relatively easy to move around, or with modern technology, to remove and reduce.

Hence, yes, terminal decline. I own a small manufacturing business, life is still good, but in my 25 years in the business I have seen almost all my competitors and allies vanish - I'm fortunate to have recruited a keen as mustard 18 year old to train as a machinist, and he shows great promise and will never be out of work, but its so bloody rare now.

@Thepeopleversuswork Agree, we haven’t invested in young people for years & now the message is “don’t worry be a plumber” but even employment might mean you can’t afford a house, dc & will have to work until 70 because the state pension will be moving out. The skilled workers will emigrate.

I have a degree in English and Classics - I work in telecoms. Degrees teach transferrable skills.

BTW the job I do now didn't really exist in its current form when I was going to university. The best skills for the modern world are flexibility and the ability to pivot.

Blogging about their digital nomad lifestyle

OP, you sound like the bargees complaining that now the railways have come along and goods are being transported by train there's no work left on the canals. Or all the coachmen and men with horses and carts complaining that now the internal combustion engine and trams have come along there's no need for their services any more. Your children will be educated for free and will learn the skills they need to find work.

The world has always changed and people have always bemoaned it. Please don't talk like this in front of your children. No wonder so many adolescents are anxious and depressed if their parents are spouting doom and disaster.

You mean the jobs that will be mainly done by AI then

Some standard degrees also have long hours. During mine I did 8-5 on placement with another 3-4 hours study when I got back.

Too many non working people being propped up by a shrinking workforce that’s taxed to an inch of its life.

pensioners?

I think there’s more options for the youngsters nowadays now than a few years ago. Five years ago, the default route was uni. Now there’s all the apprenticeships around as well, at various levels.

Also, I well remember the recession of 1990. People were getting made redundant in jobs-for-life’ industries, and then being made unemployed was a dirty word. Graduate and school leaver schemes disappeared overnight. Negative equity on houses. It was a bleak time.

You are right @Carmes. It's clear from this thread and one or two others that lots of people are starting to recognise how bad the problems are, particularly in the UK and other European countries.
I have an excellent article about this. Happy to send it to you- PM me if you would like to read it.

We say stuff like this to pretend we’re ok with our declining state in the UK.

Mississipi is considered the poorest state in the USA and they still beat us on some stats regarding gdp and average income (depending which source you use).

in the uk everyone is just getting equally as poor with a few rich folk who are probably in the process of leaving.

Yes, they have been immigrating for some time and continue to do so.

We are one of the world's largest economies yet we have food and job insecurity, lack of access to basic healthcare, reliance on food banks, proliferation of payday loans, a housing crisis.
So yes, I'd agree. The UK is not a great place to live and I blame successive governments.

But the public think it’s all the fault of the boat people.