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.

Me too. But im also glad unemployed people aren’t spending their last money trying to get cleaning contracts

I find it strange that people fill gaps in online and need an essay to explain it to them. But here we go, another essay for Bambamhoohoo.

I think anyone knows that have to start at the bottom and work way up to a, get some money and more importantly b, learn the industry and make contacts. Then off you go, bloody hard work and can start own company.

Who even are you? I have no idea who you are and what your problem is

I agree but I don't think it matters if they work hard or not.

I think the main factor in moving jobs abroad will be: we don't need office space and if they can do the job from a bedroom in Slough, the same job can be done from a bedroom in Mumbai or an AI centre anywhere

Granted though, those slacking won't have helped.

Even if you have a job that is ai proof...how will people pay for it? No one will need or want a cleaner if they're unemployed and sitting at home all day.

There is one issue that might stem the relentless flow of AI, which ironically I have learned about because I am currently doing an12 month AI apprenticeship through work, which is that if you just have content being churned out by AIs working off content churned out by AIs, it degrades, just becomes nonsense as I guess there's just not enough human context. This could be a bottleneck in capability.

Agreed. I think what I meant was is that the emergence of AI will expose those sort of “pretend” jobs a bit more. I think those sort of jobs typically exist among the middle class in the corporate world. People who work in jobs that involve answering emails or filling in spreadsheets will drop from the workforce like flies.

most of the expert analysis said that the uk had lost the big AI race in terms of firms owned and run here, so getting some AI jobs based here through offering market to the US AI companies was the best we can do.

the thing is we lost the battle with having a pro business and pro well funded research climate and a vibrant stock exchange years ago….

agree re the AI jobs needing very specific PhDs and experience - few of us in our middle age are going to retrain for 10 years and be at the vanguard, and few young graduates will be well qualified enough either.

I think the wfh is a really interesting point.

ill caveat this by saying everyone thinks they work hard. Bearing that in mind….

if you take most office jobs, they are pretty unproductive. Meetings about projects and plans, reporting, initiatives to make the company perform better, ways to ensure that better. Most of it genuinely isn’t very productive or output based. A lot of it has longer term results which aren’t always acknowledged

if I just pick on a random job (no offence to them) but take risk. I sit on boards and look at the risk map for 3 minutes a quarter. Many companies have entire teams who, amongst other things, produce and advise on these risk maps. It’s a very random example but you can see why people would think- what are they doing all day that I can see, in front of me, as valuable?

work from home has created a shift in that people have started to question value in a way they never did. Previously when they saw the risk team bashing away at their keyboards all day, presenting at meetings and so on. Now it’s unseen, and it’s starting to be unnoticed

Yup, that’s what seems to make up a lot of the jobs in the corporate world. Meetings about meetings, about meetings, about meetings. Everyone is constantly in a meeting. It’s although they are desperate to fill the calendar with something in the absence of other meaningful work. I have seen this first-hand.

Teams has fully taken over. I had my probation meeting over Teams, despite me and my manager being feet away from each other in the same room.

I read a very interesting book a number of years ago about the growth of technology and the impact it would have on jobs and this was early days of AI and the fear was about robots.

AI is a real threat. I know graduates who can’t get jobs because their entry roles have been erased as people use more AI in the workplace. Tutor education sites are having knowledge hoovered up by AI, my knitting /crochet was horrified that her work was being taken and copied but there’s nothing she can do about it.

My sister was told last week that her HR team were being closed due to the push on employee portals with chat functions and the business felt it could operate with a much smaller HR dept who could serve multiple sites remotely and with occasional visits.

Anyway the book I must have read about 10 years ago basically said that the workforce of the future needed practical skills. The workers who would be safest would be tradespeople not office workers. I feel lucky that I managed to reach early retirement (DH as well) but I fear for people in their 20s /30s.k

No you wouldn't have any idea.

Get them into a trade. Plumbing, electrics, probably not bricklaying, nursing should be safeish, drains as someone said above, gardening, cleaning, I'm sure there are more.

Once driverless cars become common place, all the driving jobs will be gone.

My industry is seeing a lot of the lower-end jobs being replaced by AI, and now they're looking to replace one of our core processes with something AI-based which, if not likely to lead to redundancies, will make my day to day work incredibly dull and shit. I look at other jobs from time to time at the moment but everything is 'requires five years experience in identical role and extremely specific degree, pay £-10k'

I'm autistic so the last thing I want to do is try and find a new job with an employer who may not 'get me' or spend two years worrying that I'll be dismissed simply because they find me a bit weird.

I know loads of people who are either going through redundancy or maybe in the near future. Even when it not your job on the line it creates an onimous atmosphere and puts people off spending. Then it just becomes a bit of a feedback loop.

Feels like the only growth industry is being a landlord (until the acceptance of AI, which is shit but what can you do if companies don't want to employ humans to deal with anymore, just suck it up, means nobody has money to pay the rent)

The problem with that is that it is so short sighted. Those higher level solicitors will retire and the skills will be lost unless they have invested in training young people to do those jobs in the future. This is the issue at the moment with things like construction, plumbing, electricians etc. You can't just magically become one. You need experienced people to teach you, and those people just aren't there. They dont want to give upbtheir £80 an hour job to teach some kids at the FE college for £30 an hour or slow down their work to take on an apprentice. Some do, but apprentices need a day at college to learn the practical techniques before being let loose on someones rewiring. If no one is standing there teaching them how to do it the course cant run and thats 20 potential plumbers that arent available. Another issue is that its not that nowhere needs people to do jobs because of AI its just that a lot of jobs need funding, which comes from taxation, which largely comes from economic growth, which we dont have. So paralegals may not have jobs and we have a massive oversupply of law graduates yet our criminal justice system is falling apart at the seams. It needs money to be put into courts, staff to be paid to sit on extra court days, prison staff etc etc. There is not enough money to pay them. Schools need teaching assistants, especially those wjo can work with SEND children, many of whom need 1-1 support. Theres no money to pay for them. Social work, adult care etc all need more people but there is no money to pay for it. Its all very well saying " tax the rich' ( which I agree with- we need a fairer taxation system especially when it comes to corporations)but many of them are international. Elon Musk wont be giving money to us. He lives in the US. We need to grow infrastructure and create jobs here, for young people in the UK, and create an environment where businesses want to spend time training young people. I dont know how we row back on that though. We are a very short termist country as a whole.

Loads of LLs are selling up. It isn't worth it anymore.

I think you are talking about google AI or other freebie AIs. That’s not what companies use. They have AI customised to their needs and the big firms have all built their own. Corporate AI is excellent and now does everything a junior analyst would do. They are hiring a ton of Computer Science and Data Science grads, and because they still need people to talk to clients, a much smaller number of numerate grads who will use but not build AI. Humanities grads will not get a look in unless they are crème de la crème candidates.

Further education is the future. Construction courses are way oversubscribed, there is lots of jobs in construction and I’m not talking about plastering etc. for example data analysts, engineers etc.

I might agree with you but current AI is being trained by watching the world. The robots are being taught to walk not by code but by watching humans walk. An AI was let loose on physics and taught itself Newton's laws ..... the way Newton learned them.

So it is learning the way humans learned everything they knew, only massively faster and getting faster by the minute.

And there are now several examples of AI systems that have refused their instructions to shut down.

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that ....."

The thing that gives me a modicum of hope is that the economy is so interconnected. So it’s OK everyone saying be a plumber, but if everyone else has no work and no money, no one is going to be paying for a plumber. Similarly, automate your shop - except no one has any money to spend on luxuries, so it’s going to fail.

Completely agree. Turkeys voting for Christmas

To be clear, I'd rather fuck a cactus backwards than be a landlord myself, but at least landlords are going to be able to retire.