Anyone else worried about the terrible job market?

[Sorryagain]

I’ve been self employed throughout my professional life - over 30 years. I was in one profession, then broadened out and added more skills and generated a lot of work in another industry.

Both industries are fucked. Tons of redundancies, no hires. Barely any contract work. Lots of people looking. LinkedIn is a cesspit.

I am used to the hustle - but I’ve never known it so hard, nigh on impossible, to get work.

Ive been applying for permanent roles I think I could do - but even with my tons of transferrable skills, such is the market that there are enough people who perfectly fit the job description that I don’t get a look in.

Im lucky in that I have a partner who works - but I want to work. I’m seriously terrified of how bad things are - it’s never been like this for me, ever.

I just wanted to see if others are facing this?

And because I think it’s a combo of AI and cost of living/economics, I can’t see how things will improve.

And it's taking interesting jobs. DD lost her software job and has been out of work for some time. My mum, who is in a care home, is fond of saying that they are always short of staff and she should work in care - DD is not a people person, she has sensory issues too, and the last thing she wants to do is wipe people's bottoms.

I work as a fashion designer. It's been pretty dire for a long time. Fast fashion retailers decimated the high street years ago and covid was the final nail in the coffin. Where a design team used to have 15 designers, now they have 3. Everyone is stretched.
That said, after 4 years of being a SAHM and some adhoc freelance work, I have picked up a few freelance jobs, mainly via linkedin and reaching out to my network. It's been a numbers game and taken alot of persistence. I'm worried though. My DH was made redundant in November. Normally employers are fighting to hire him but it's been so quiet. He's just accepted a role with a 50% pay cut because a job is better than no job but money is tight.
I've lost count of the amount of permanent roles I've applied for. Literally never hear back. I retrained too but didn't get anywhere with that either.

Oh I believe the posts on here - I think it’s just astounding that the mix of skills in the country is all out of whack, presumably Brexit related.

You are me!

c

Digital learning / online learning / e-learning / writing

100% this. If people are thinking AI won't replace them because it's not as good, they are completely deluded.

It's terrible at the moment. I have recently retrained and took voluntary redundancy from my last role in Higher education in July 2024 after finishing my master's degree in property, planning and development and it's taken until the last month before I finally started getting any decent responses and a steady stream of interviews. I applied for over 200 jobs and confidently say at least 90% of them completely ignored my application/ ghosted me/ promised interviews and then disappeared. I have finally accepted an offer of a new graduate role with a planning consultancy and was so convinced it was going to go wrong that I lined up 3 additional interviews just to come myself. It's had a huge affect on my confidence and my mental health and I really feel for others going through this.

I agree with what others have said, contacting companies and applying for roles directly helped as LinkedIn job applications were just a waste of time, also, finding decent recruiters, and not being afraid to follow things up.

You need to try and employ yourself today if you can, rather than hoping someone else will.

Hmmm. Can't comment on the other industries but positions in schools I am familiar with as they keep coming up in my job searches (related area but I am not applying for these roles). Looking at TA jobs I see they want someone with a great deal of experience but they want to pay them not much over the minimum wage. I read a job description for a cover supervisor role earlier today and it was pretty much a teacher's job (in the classroom, I don't know about planning and other duties) and the salary was £17,000 😳

Helpful if depressing thread.
Rachel Reeves, if you are reading, please pay attention.
I cannot understand why you are busy sacking civil servants and cutting disability benefits when you could be taxing the tech bros and trying to create higher quality jobs?

As far as I can personally see there is very little out there in white collar industries at the moment. It feels worse than 2009 (which was pretty bad)
The FT is full of news of layoffs in the management consulting sector.
The Guardian says that corporate services and back office like HR, IT and marketing/comms are particularly affected. (This feels true, to me).
A rec con told me that at white collar junior levels (not new grad but second job/third job) there is still a bit of movement but at senior levels no-one is moving - because they are all worried about the uncertain climate. To add to this, Brexit has shrunk the economy (by an annual 4%, which would certainly be enough to employ everyone on this thread), Rachel Reeves's economic policies have not so far been in any way informed by the Keynesian investment ideas you might expect (I think she must be taking advice from George Osborne, frankly, it's a complete swizz and I may as well have voted Tory) plus Donald Trump isn't helping either.
So where are the job vacancies that do exist? I've been trying to work this out myself ...
Some possibles ...
*Construction (as @BoredZelda mentions) - although I am bit wary of this very broad heading. Should we be retraining as plumbers? Brickies? Some commentators have been talking about "green construction jobs" eg in retrofitting older houses with insulation, installing heat pumps. I quite like the fantasy of a Mumsnet army of construction workers taking over jobs in the building trade from all the sexist, bum cleavage cowboys (light hearted comment - I know there are also some great builders out there) but I am not really sure whether actual paid jobs really exist at this time or are for now just a fiction of the green imagination.
*A PP mentioned social work. Presumably this would also mean retraining. For example, no-one is going to let me loose on a sensitive safeguarding case without certain qualifications (and potentially experience), right?
*Care sector? I thought care homes were cutting their budgets to the minimum and going bust!

*Secondary school teaching - MN is full of threads by desperate teachers all saying how awful it is. Again at least a year's retraining involved
At the higher paying side:
*fossil fuels? - there is currently some retrenchment in Big Oil away from net zero and back towards oil. Could be an option if you aren't very green-minded and/or could relocate or commute to the Middle East
*Defence? - all these mooted billions of investment are going precisely where? I'm not sure yet, the procurement can take years. This could suit some?
*Magic circle law sector? - there has been a lot of action here recently with US firms buying up UK ones and some telephone number salaries flying around. But I am not sure if this knocks on into other functions in these firms
*there are probably some new areas of science incoming - not sure what all of these are.
Please add any other ideas and insights below, I'm sure I haven't captured them all.

In the bigger picture, where is all the money that could otherwise be supplying the UK economy and paying wages? An economist will I'm sure be along in a minute but:
*as far as I can tell there's huge and increasing sums locked up in the global shadow economy - meaning property and investments owned by the wealthy and disguised by Caymans ownership and similar.
*for the UK, getting some or all of the frictionless trade with the EU back would help over time. Loads of businesses have just stopped trading with the EU since 2020 and the total of all the jobs cut has added up

I can confirm - Running out of lecturers to teach new ones, though.

Agree with the comment about the social contract being close to broken. I've friends in various private sector roles struggling with redundancies and/or not being able to find a new job, and my public sector friends are unravelling mentally and physically due to a lack of staff and resources.

A right old mess.

@bobajob1
Health and social care will be a growth area. We have an aging sick population as do many western economies (ours is sicker than most).
Even if funding models and structures change we are going to need more physios, nurses. OT's, Dr's and psychological therapists. It's an aging workforce and we have topped out on overseas recruitment (which is morally dubious anyway). There are now apprenticeship training routes for nearly all professions and the NHS also needs estates, IT, HR, procurement specialists etc etc ....

DH works in the motor trade and has just been made redundant. His whole branch, along with three other branches. That's hundreds of employees out of work.

I work very part time due to my health and have been applying for full-time roles after the news of DH's redundancy. I've applied for about 50 positions in the last few weeks. All low-level admin type roles either in person or wfh. I've heard back from one company with a rejection stating they had over 1000 applicants!! That's a bog standard admin job. And for context, I have six years admin/customer service experience plus a BA and a Masters degree.

That's 50 jobs I've applied for this month and not even one interview.

It's awful.

If your job involves mainly working on a computer than AI can and will take it. Those of us who work with our hands and only touch the keyboard to do non work stuff out of working hours are safe for now as there is not the technology available as yet to replace us, I doubt my job (electrician) will be threatened in my working life.

In order to make / introduce new money to an economic system you have to produce something to sell to another economy - traditionally you could grow or mine a resource and sell it raw, or process the same, adding value and then sell it. or purchase a raw material, process it and sell it again having added value. More recently, you could sell a nebulous service, problem there is that in an increasingly digital world and with AI taking hold, that can easily be undercut / eroded or moved.

We simply don't make enough of anything anymore to export and bring in new money. We built our economy on selling products to the world over about 200 years, and have wilfully destroyed that industrial base, coasting along on a service economy that is now failing - its far too late to go back - and so our economic fate is sealed, decline. decline, decline. It can't be fixed because too few people now have the skills or initiative to get it going to any scale again and too many of the population expect to not have to work in what are perceived as dirty jobs.

As an electrical engineer, this makes me very sad, I was working on a panel today, installed in 1963 and built in Birmingham - the makers plate proudly states that they have offices and agents in: then proceeds to list major cities in most of the world, all places that company exported its products to. The company still exists, its head office now being in the US and all production in China, just sad.

@YourAzureEagle I actually quite like the thought of starting a manufacturing business. The barriers to entry for manufacturing are very high ... but I bet someone on this thread has got an idea ...

Did you know therenare AI physiotherapists here in the UK?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/09/first-nhs-physiotherapy-clinic-run-by-ai-to-start-this-year

I also thought this was interesting:

https://healthcare-in-europe.com/en/news/robots-nursing-homes-employee-retention-care.html

@YourAzureEagle how easy is it to become an electrician? And do you enjoy doing it? I think I wouldn’t like the logistics of having to drive around to different jobs all the time, do you mind that side of it?

AI may not take your job, but once the kids figure out that this is the route to a decently paid, ‘safe’ job, you might find that there’s a lot of competition! Sectors like this will eventually be overwhelmed by people looking for AI free jobs in an increasingly small number of areas.

But we can’t all retrain in ‘hands on/trades’.

What will happen to the zillions of us who do use a computer to do the bulk of our jobs?

I don’t think AI is currently responsible for all the job losses - I think it’s a weak as shit economy - but Ai will soon become the problem. And then what?

I’m closer to retirement age than not. Maybe I need to just coast in whatever way i can until then.

honestly, I’m a positive person usually but there’s something about these changes, combined with climate crisis and global events that is almost too much to bear

@Crikeyalmighty

Personally I would have ignored the press and stuck 1% on tax and 1% on VAT

I agree. Makes far more sense than killing economic growth with the stupid NIC changes. It's probably what Rachel is going to have to do anyway now that public finances have actually got worse since her Budget changes and with Starmer bottling out of the benefit clampdown - saving £5bn is a drop in the ocean and a fraction of what needs to be done, IF it happens at all.

If the "need" for computer users falls, as it is indeed doing, then you can't keep people employed twiddling their thumbs and you can't put them on the dole and pay them benefits for the rest of their working life.

We have a massive shortage in "hands on/trades", including drivers, all construction trades, mechanics, etc. We need to get back to the adult education we had up to the 90s and 00s where adults had lots of options for retraining.

We don't need "everyone" to retrain doing something with their hands. We just need enough of them to tackle the massive shortages, and with more manual workers, there'll be more back office "support" they'll need, i.e. admin, HR, payroll, training, planning, management, etc. which in turn gives more jobs for the office dwellers (but who themselves will have had to retrain to cope with fast growing changes such as AI), so more programming and database abilities rather than just typing letters on a word processor!

We need a more agile workforce. "Jobs for life" are clearing long gone in a lot of industries, especially in a fast moving global economy. To get an agile workforce, we need to divert training/education funds away from 16-21 year olds to party at universities and balance it out more so that adults have opportunities for training and upskilling to.

@taxguru programming jobs are already at threat from AI too, especially entry level ones

I’m totally not a hands on person - I’d be an awful tradesperson.

i should have been a psychotherapist - I thought about it for years and never did it. The ones I know are swamped for work