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.

The employment rights bill is not helping. More companies are starting to outsource off shore to protect themselves against the employment costs, current and pending.

I'm NHS and I've spent 6 months waiting to be either redeployed or made redundant. Thankfully got redeployement, 2 weeks in and loads of work to do. Just been told I am likely back on redeployment list in Jan as my new area have to cut staff by 40%. I want out of the rollercoaster but nothing around to even apply to.

It's crazy. My relative used to work in meteorology for the government. (He is not in the UK.) Several years ago now he was told they are getting out of doing data collection, part of his job, because they were going to move into using AI for predictions. He retired as soon as he could, demoralised.

How the AI is supposed to predict the weather without accurate data to work from? They didn't seem to know.

I think a lot of sectors will find the switch to AI pretty shitty, but I can't decide if that will be good, as they will give it up, or horrible, as they won't.

The working from home that everyone demanded as a right, they couldn’t see that them working from their home was the same as someone else sat in a different country doing the same job at a cheaper cost.

It's been this way for about a decade and most used to put down roots and stay. The thing I'm seeing more often is people getting fully qualified (between 5 to 10 years after their degree) moving back to the cheaper home country and working there, remotely, for a UK company on UK wages.

I wondered about this. My daughter is working at reception in a law firm, she loves the firm and finds the work interesting, and was thinking of doing the paralegal course. Reception doesn't pay that well. She decided in the end to do a music degree, which is her passion, and then law if she wants to go that way.

I've been quite worried about the whole thing but it did occur to me that AI might affect the paralegal role significantly.

I agree. I work for a large city law firm. They are investing so much in AI and basically making all of us use it. It’s not great currently but it learns from being used and will mean that graduate jobs are decreased. They have already messed around with the route to entry on the grounds that they are improving routes to entry - I qualified at 23 - now most of the trainees starting are 26 or 27 with years of paralegaling at minimum wage behind them and even more never get past a paralegal position. It’s fine for the chosen few that end up on £150k a year as a nq but there will be so much less demand in the coming years. Actually gaining partnership in a traditional city firm is also becoming more difficult year on year and is now more about your business development abilities than your actual legal knowledge. I see very few lawyers these days of the calibre I trained under and I see AI just speeding up the decline and loss of knowledge.

@gymboe Job market is horrific.

Part of the issue is that every advert on Linkedin has at least 100 applications. So right from the beginning, you have less than a 1% chance of being successful for any job vacancy.

And then you have to get through the interview, which is really just a bullshit scenario that bears no resemblance to the actual workplace.

But sure, every out-of-touch mumsnetter will tell you that your issues are caused by not working hard enough, and the reason why they progressed in their careers is because they worked harder than you did.

For the last 25 years I’ve worked in admin jobs, the one I’m doing now is set to be replaced by AI. We have had demos about what it will do and initially our role will be to check that the AI has done things correctly. Obviously, once the AI is up and running there will not be a need for humans in the role, so I’ve been looking at what is out there. The truth is that there are next to no jobs, anything that I’ve done in the past is being replace by automation. I’m 20 years from retirement so it’s scary stuff.

Not so sure about that either. The Marine’s in the USA have stopped training new snipers as AI is more accurate

That’s even worse than I thought!

Seriously, is there no one in charge who is capable of thinking things through to their logical conclusion? 🤦‍♀️

We’d be wasting our time fighting against it. We’re talking big companies who of course are going to welcome AI with open arms if it means increased salaries and bonuses for themselves. They’re not going to listen to us little plebs are they?

The truth is, we as consumers have supported the loss/export of jobs for years and years. First it was manufacturing, then agriculture, then service jobs, now it's replacement by AI. As long as we can get our goods and services cheap we do - and then whine that all the jobs are going.

2 DCs of uni age. One having a 'year out', managed to get a job, having applied for SIX HUNDRED positions. Not sure they will go back to uni if job goes well (STEM at an RG uni) as they think uni (with exceptions) doesn't add much - experience and perseverance and superhuman resilience needed, however they can be gained. Other DC plugging on with uni... bit of a niche but maybe niches will be the last bastion of the human.

I am a GP and am getting trained up in more interventional stuff. Ai is coming for us too.

No. Anyone who isn't worried might not fully realise what it can be like now. True, some people are lucky, but not many of my friends' teenagers can get the kind of jobs we once just expected (supermarket staff, waiting on etc) and since the last budget, one of the local managers said he just can't hire the staff he wants-and he was one who would take on youngsters. My friend's daughter is a nurse, and struggling to find work (who would have thought a nurse wouldn't easily find a job?)
Even graduates who once expected well paid first jobs are finding AI is taking many entry level jobs.

I work in tech and am worried for my future. I will not use AI (knowingly), on principle. But it's in every process and system we implement nowadays 😞 it's going to be very hard not to compromise my morals and keep my job. Fortunately though, it is unlikely to replace my actual role (fingers crossed)
However I did job hunt earlier on in the year and it is tough out there at the moment. When we recruited earlier on in the year we were getting 2-3 times the normal number of applications we'd get.
I'm fully remote/home based due to my location, which adds an extra layer of complexity as most places are now hybrid but I'm not close enough to the kind of locations where my job would come up to commute. So I'm resigned to making the most of my job!

It’s really scary as a mum of young adults. One dd had done very well and secured a permanent role as a post grad this summer and the other is in year 2 and has a very sensible plan for when she graduates. But it’s a worry when my dh is always talking redundancy and my trust have announced redundancies, work for us won’t be easy to find I don’t think.

Well in some ways yes but then we are observing with the tools we use at work that the more sophisticated they get the more prone they seem to be to “hallucinating”. If that trend can’t be fixed then it’s a concern.

As a PP on here has commented, there has been some predictions that to stay competitive, a company’s USPs will need to be the personal, human touch so I do expect the pendulum will swing back towards people and away from digital at some point. Also I think young people will eventually reject digital and crave relationships and creativity, meaning that people focused roles will be needed.

A quick scan of our local authority careers page shows lots of job vacancies in social work, early help, education, youth justice. There have been big campaigns recently to get people to work in early years and the probation service. We have an ageing population to consider who will all need caring for. I think maybe we’re just due a shift away from office based roles? Imagine if all those in roles displaced by AI retrained into one of the vocations with huge shortages… we could be well on the way to fixing society! However I realise how idealistic this is and the reality is that it would just never work. Look at the current state of play with NHS jobs, it’s a shambles. It is a travesty that newly qualified nurses and midwives can’t get jobs despite the glaringly obvious gaping holes in these services and desperate need for more people!

One can dream…

She isn’t being silly. It’s actually a very measured and accurate response.

AI is only as good as the data, reliability and importantly the people developing it and then consumers using it. Even in workplaces, you can implement the best AI tooling, but if the end user isn’t over IT literate, the tool isn’t that good.

The reason jobs aren’t available is not solely AI. We simply aren’t there yet, the tooling isn’t smart enough to operate with meaningful output without human prompting or intervention. The reason for job losses is we are overly populated, we are offshoring work to cheaper resources (not AI) and the economy is struggling with various increased taxes so business can’t afford to recruit and consumers are pulling back on spending.

I work in AI. It isn’t taking our jobs in the masses people are worried about. It isn’t yet smart enough and it won’t be for a while. AI is still very reliant on human analysis and input. The people who will be left behind are the ones who don’t learn how to utilise the tools to make them more efficient and productive in their actual job roles.

That give scary, Terminator vibes!

It wasn't AI but a major shift in my sector that has caused a catastrophic downturn.

Lower salaries, lower day rates for interim, fewer opportunities for experienced hires.

The job market is on the ground...

Oh another tear of AI and everything will be so broken that humans will need to clean things up.

If I see another report written by ai I'll go mad.
They're full of bullet points and sections of nonsense.

I have a few friends who have been out of work for two years now. This is finance, and work has dropped off a cliff.

I see so many highly qualified, talented people on my LinkedIn feed looking for work. They would also have been in well paid PAYE roles, so a loss to the country’s finances as well.