Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

Are you easily replaceable by AI?

no I don’t feel under threat but that is because of the industry I work in and the nature of the work I do.
if I was in many others, then I would feel anxious

I guess so. I mean it’s an account lead. Status calls, timelines, strategy, finance

We're insane to sleepwalk into this. There are endless accounts of AI being utterly crap. Customer service turned over to bots. We shouldn't accept cut-price services run by AI which is making humans redundant. This isn't the Luddite in me speaking; I have serious concerns about what this will do to social mobility. It's time we said no. Very loudly and clearly.

And your partner?

No to what exactly?

It’s so bad. Decent people on linked in out of work for months. Hundreds applying for single jobs. I saw that a large ad agency merged with another this week too and that’s 4000 people without a job. AI was to blame too. You are literally competing with hundreds for each role.

if we replace call centres with bots
if we replace Tesco workers with self service
if we replace me with AI
marketing, hr, finance, creative industries massively affected

where are we all going to work?

I agree, even those people that think they are immune to AI are at risk due to the ripples it will cause when so many are out of work.

Yep, it's utterly dire. My firm has completed several rounds of redundancies. Any folks leaving now are replaced by offshore resource. We're also all in with AI and there's no going back on that front as we're all so terrified of becoming obsolete if we don't.

Labour are taxing and regulating jobs out of existence, which will only increase the pace of AI adoption.

If the NHS and schools had more jobs at higher pay everyone would be complaining they were overpaid and too many not in front facing roles!

This was see in the shopping malls, the mass increase in self service just after the rise in employer NI.

Agree. It's taken me 6 months to find a job after redundancy and I've had to take a significant pay cut. In prior years I had interviews and offers nicely lined up within a few weeks. The jobs just aren't there the way they used to be. Even though I'm OK for now, I'm really worried for the next time I get made redundant. I'm not young any more so that's another factor.

YADNBU.

People utterly have their heads in the sand if they think we're not heading for implosion.

The market is saturated with people looking for jobs. Any part time job you see is snapped up in no time. My DDs, one in and one just out of sixth form are really struggling to find PT jobs and they're applying for everything. They're sensible, hard working kids, already with employment experience. They've applied for dozens and usually never get a reply.

It used to a be doddle to find some p/t work as a teen. I am really starting to worry about how their futures look.

I'm a carer but my DHs quite niche field (and very non AI affected) has seen an unbelievable drop in the number of positions available vs the number of applicants.

The population increase plus AI is going to annihilate the future of this country.

My husband is in IT and job market has just collapsed in last two years - he's worked for about 6 months of the last two years. Luckily a lot of it was contracting so he can still pay bills but not sure how much longer that will last. Its actually slightly better than last year when he did not have even a single agent contact or call back between April to just before Christmas (which led to a very short contract start of this year) but looking since August he has had 4 or 5 interviews and a few other discussions at least.

It's lucky I've moved from a low paid, increasingly low-options field to a better paid, (currently) in demand niche where I can probably level up easily.

But yeah, I worry we are drifting into a scenario where AI allows even more wealth and income concentration to ever fewer people and by the time governments catch on those people will be too powerful to force to pay something back to society to emiliorate the effects of mass automation. Not saying that all definitely happening, but if there is mass automation I don't see most billionaires willingly going 'Yes, we most give a dividend back to society so everyone can live comfortably'

The jobs market is awful for the young too - highest youth unemployment we’ve had to date…care homes, care jobs - that’s where we’ll be working.

I know graduates are having a very hard time finding jobs, even with degrees in Computer Science or Finance. Competition is huge. Too many graduates? But as you say starter jobs have been swallowed up by AI or rolled into other people responsibilities.
I started as an art junior in publishing. There was four of us in the department. Now it doesn’t exist anymore. There was an art editor and production editor on every magazine, now just a production editor and most magazines are online. Sales staff doesn’t seem to have decreased as much though, but it was always a soulless job.

YANBU at all.
DD is still in the "temporary" retail job she began after college well over a year ago now. That job took months to find. Luckily, it's ok pay and actually a nice place to work and she's very good at it. Even though DD continues to look, she can't find anything suitable. I've also had a look and there are hardly any jobs advertised compared to a couple of years ago.
DS is autistic and at college doing computer studies and I have absolutely no idea how he is going to find a job when he leaves next year. I've heard from numerous people that the IT market has nothing currently and being autistic he would need an understanding boss so is obviously going to struggle next to other NT candidates.
It's really worrying and I'm surprised there haven't been more news stories/documentaries about it.

I'm also finding that the type of job had 10 years ago before my kids were born now basically pays minimum wage. It used to be a reasonable amount more.

Relevance?

My fixed term job is coming to an end at the end of march and I think I'm just going to have to retire early and live very frugally.
DS is graduating next summer and I am so fearful for him getting anything. he has struggled even to get a part time student job in his Uni town.

Yanbu this gov is hammering jobs. Even pro Labour on here must have kids who want to work at some point.

It is getting worse as there are no jobs and with people believing AI is the answer to everything. It really isn’t. It’s only as good as the data delivered to it and if human beings aren’t being used to validate that, AI is going to be useless.

Oh don’t be silly

it is improving exponentially with every year that passes

And I heard recently of a local GP getting made redundant. The nhs certainly isn’t safe. 10-15 years ago our local council employed loads of people. Their building go turned into houses a few years back. And I look at jobs today. There is one job that I am not qualified to do… ONE!!!!!!