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.

Lucky to be employed but competing against the sector for internal advancement opportunities with roles getting 100+ applicants. It must be grim to be unemployed. It is certainly making me circumspect about splashing the cash this Xmas.

Agree Brexit has been a disaster. Ironically there’s one area the uk is doing well - AI. The UK has a lot of pioneering AI startups ups. It’s why Trump just invested billions of dollars in UK AI in sep. The UK is good at tech generally.

This is a good point. If we are all concerned about this, what do we do in the meantime? I hate to have some kind of prepper mentality, but surely we have to batten down the hatches even a little?

Youth unemployment is higher in some EU countries isn’t it?

People are leaving the UK in huge numbers. Recent net migration stands at 204,000, which sounds fairly static and reasonable until you realise that this figure is made up from the difference between the 800,000+ who arrived in the last year and the 600,000+ who left. Of those 800,000+ arrivals 100,000+ are asylum seekers who are not allowed to work by law. So they have to be supported by those currently working in the UK until they have their asylum application granted and can support themselves.

If AI removes higher-skilled jobs such as entry-level legal positions, then graduates will be competing against asylum-granted migrants for whatever jobs are left, be they lower skilled or ones you need specific qualifications for.

The alternative is that UK trained graduates join the 600,000+ leaving and look for opportunities elsewhere.

Long term we could be in for one hell of a bumpy ride.

Unfortunately I think this is going to be the trend in the next couple of years. I also see a large wave of redundancy coming in the foreseeable future….

I agree and said the same thing in an earlier post.

I mean, AI is definitely being developed to trim the workforce and save human staffing costs. However I think we are years away from achieving that.

Tech is just being decimated in this country, and that’s what so many people were directed into. It’s so worrying.

This is the sort of thing my mum used to refer to as silly-clever.

And always difficult to really compare because in one decade people will be classed as unemployed and in another decade will be counted in with the sick/ disabled - both Tory and Labour massage the figures for political purposes

There will always be older people who cannot do it themselves who will need to pay people from their Attendance Allowance or whatever. same as they will pay for carers. There are a lot of pensioners sitting on a lot of money .

This is exactly the case for my DH too.
Another family member has just been made redundant and I'm worried for them.
I don't use AI on principle as far as I can avoid it - the stuff I've been unable to avoid has been rubbish too - but I worry about our children's future jobs.

This is true. They way that they calculate lots of things has changed to make the figures appear better than they really are.

I know someone who works with young people in usa. They said one young man in high school asked about how to get into the military, as that’s where the only good jobs will be in future 😮 scary thought.

It has always been higher due to structural problems. uK did not face that, we had a very good thriving economy and got slowly killed. Not sure how you don’t see that.

I have said below and elsewhere it’s bad not sure what you’re talking about here.

AI requires a lot of energy and water. Whilst renewable energy sources will help with the first, water is a finite resource and we can’t create more of it from wind or sunshine. Yes, desalination exists, but that throws up problems of its own.

We also have a rapidly increasing population and one of the things people require to sustain life is water. Humans also use electricity.

AI may find itself in direct competition for resources with humans. Hopefully whatever government is in place as AI demands more, is able to see this and places the needs of humans resident in the country before shareholders in AI firms living abroad.

It's bleak I'm in my late 20s just bought in London and public sector we've just made a lot junior staff redundant.

What is also difficult is those of us late 20s-early 30s we want to take a step up from junior to management and it's becoming increasingly hard because the people who occupy management positions are older and stay in there longer whereas usually when people retired in their 50s it created a natural churn that just isn't happening anymore so we're just waiting. It's scary tbh

Agree - a country where people leave more than arrive is at trouble. Whatever rethoric has been fed by populist parties immigrants bring jobs, skills and create work, other than paying taxes and they creare more wealth then they consume servire. If the migration flux is interrupted and also people leave in drove the economy suffers.

In my office, they come from Poland, Spain, France, Latvia, South Africa, Chile......

The difference is though, that now we (and I mean women) have the education and the rights and access to decide when we have children. Women in history did not have such choices. I’m not a social historian expert but I know in difficult times women had to resort to extremes when they could not afford and/or cope with unborn babies.

Now, women have education and critical thinking and access to news sources first hand and can take independent action - looking at what we know right now, it’s absolutely right that women understand the state of our local areas, our country, our world and our climate and environment and make the choice that’s right for them and future generations.

Personally, I’m worried about what the huge impact that climate change is going to have in terms of food production and climate migration.

Agreed. I'm an assistant head in a school with no deputy. Low birth rate has obliterated local schools and I'm being restructured out of my post, with the whole job being deleted. It will literally just be the head and main pay scale teachers.

I'm absolutely terrified, there are no jobs at my level anymore, schools can't even afford supply and I'm hardly going to be attractive in comparison to an ECT. I've done acting headship and it's hell. I have no idea what to do come September..

Sorry to hear that. Lots of schools have made their TAs redundant as budgets have been cut and cut.

Are they intending to stay long term, do you know?

If they’re just looking to spend a few years in a foreign country and then return to their homelands then that really isn’t good for this country. When they leave they take their skills and experience with them. They’re also more likely to be house-sharing than those who intend to stay, putting pressure on rooms for rent which would historically have been a way for UK graduates to move to a new city.

If were employing foreign graduates then ideally we need them to stay, to put economic roots into the country and to be around to train up the next generation of employees, both UK born and other foreign graduates.

If foreign graduates are the employees of choice for some employers but they go home after 5/6 or even 10 years, then they not only do they take their spending power and savings with them, but they also don’t form a coherent ladder of training and responsibility progression that would mentor new recruits at the bottom.

Plus they don’t raise kids here, so we end up with a diminishing cohort of kids relative to the number of aging adults. That’s an issue in itself.

Basically, if they go and current management reaches retirement, who trains the UK graduates to take over - or are they expected to join the exodus? In fact, does the business cease to exist at that point? So no jobs for any graduate - UK or foreign trained??