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.

Yes in a time before population explosion.

There are exponentially more people looking for and applying for the same jobs now. The proof is literally in the pudding. Perfectly qualified people are not even getting a reply, let alone getting as far as the interview process.

Teens and uni leavers fighting against hundreds for paltry minimum wage jobs that were ten a penny 25-30 years ago.

Unemployment of 5% is lowest since 1975. Compared to…

80s - monetarism under Thatcher 12%
early 90s - gulf war/oil price rise/uk crashing out of the ERM under Major 11%
late 00s was the subprime crash under Cameron 8%.

So not quite true to say Labour govt are responsible for unemployment.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms

I really worry for my DS16. He’s applied to do a T Level in aerospace engineering - he really wants to work in the defence sector. He’s autistic but very bright. He chose his route because he isn’t ‘work ready’, which you employers expect you to be for an apprenticeship, but we also felt it was important to be able to show some proof of employability that he wouldn’t get if he went to Uni. He will need an autism friendly employer but employers need to feel reassured that he can actually work to expected standards, not just on paper, if they are going to hire him.

The course he’s chosen is equivalent to x3 A Levels and it comes with 20weeks work placement, a mixture of academic and hands on learning, and the college he’s going to has strong links with the defence employers that he is aiming for. Once he’s done it, the idea is that he can then apply for a higher apprenticeship with one of these employers, or go to Uni.

I’m just so scared for him.

My youngest is 12 and has learning difficulties alongside autism and is in specialist school. I honestly don’t know how on earth he will stand a chance in the job market against graduates and work experienced NT adults, even for the most basic of part time jobs like stacking shelves.

The population of 18 year olds is the lowest it’s been. That’s partly why schools and universities are struggling for students.

until the covid babies come through, there is no “bulge year”

Yes this. I was utterly gobsmacked to learn a garden centre had 300 applications for a few hours on a weekend, minimum wage. People are desperate. There is increasingly nothing out there and like pp have mentioned, overseas workers have swamped the staff market even more. It is absolutely dire.

I am genuinely scared for my DC.

What is economic inactivity like?

Is it just people not actively looking

Yes employers only want skilled and experienced people at the moment, and want to save costs and keep their profits up so want to reduce staff and not pay for any training. Employees can't fund their own training, it's too expensive. End result is that everything seems sort of.…. stuck.

In an aging population, people are retiring and there's no one being trained up to replace them, and it is the same across the board, in every organisation I know of. Employers are all fighting over the remaining experienced people and the pool is just getting smaller.

We can't blame AI and hope it goes away and everything goes back to "normal". It's not going to disappear any more than the internet did, or the printing press for that matter. I do worry about the energy use of AI and cost to the environment, but it's here, and it is a very useful tool. It's going to stay for better or worse, like all technology.

Like @StrictlyComeRambling I also worry about the power a few billionaires have been allowed to accumulate. It's not AI itself that is the problem, it's the wankers who have too much control over it (and our other tech/data), and the numpty cheerleaders who continue to kiss their arseholes.

UBI? What other options are there? If people don’t have jobs they can’t afford to buy anything and the whole point of capitalism is that people buy things. If all the jobs from the bottom up are being automated, the things won’t be bought and then the companies that make them won’t succeed. Governments lose tax revenues. The whole system collapses.

or maybe it’ll be like the Matrix and we will just be energy sources for the robots, dreaming of being humans.

It's the maths. Was talking to joiner & electrician who did some work here recently. It costs them way more to have an apprentice than they can charge for the little bits of work they can do and costs them their own time teaching them so much more than they cover in college.

Well if they aren’t looking for work then they won’t get a job and they won’t get benefits either, so that’s not a long term strategy.

They will get benefits if they go on sickness benefits.

The "economically inactive" includes students in education, retirees, carers and the disabled. It's not people just sat on their arses twiddling their thumbs 🙄

Google - As of August 2025, there are a record 6.5 million people on out-of-work benefits

Are they included in that unemployment stat?

‘Twiddle their thumbs’ 🙄 You said it not me

I recently applied for a minimum wage retail job as a stopgap. I was asked what hours I could do and I said I was available for (any) 5 days across the week, from 7am to 8pm.

I didn’t get the job because they wanted someone with ‘more flexibility’. Turns out the person they gave the job to works a few hours in the morning & evenings 6 days a week. They’ve made the job a supervisory position and pay £12.50 per hour.

They also had over 50 applicants.

I wonder now if my expectation of two days off a week is unrealistic in the current jobs market or if that employer is just unreasonable. 🤔

The uk had decided to close the labour market and isolate themselves,. Brexit has been a disgrace but no politicians will admit it. What was the uk expecting by leaving a single big market?! Now they are taxing the so called wealthy so loads of jobs are going somewhere else. People are not starting businesses in the uk anymore as it’s just too expensive, limited talent pool, too many taxes. Loads of people are also badly qualified, which is a huge problem. Yes it is easier to blame AI but this is a just a factor.

I read an article in (I think) Forbes about six months ago that said in a few years, AI will have replaced at least 50% of jobs. That’s beginning to sound more and more plausible.

I think the figures are disguising the stagnation of the job market. People seem to be staying in jobs they hate because there aren’t other options. I’ve heard this from people in so many sectors- there’s a real fear.

The unemployment figures won’t cover people in nhs roles about to be made redundant (thousands) or senior people who have settlements and aren’t claiming benefits. I am convinced the picture is much bleaker than the stats make out.

I can see already at work that the tasks I used to give new graduates can be done on co-pilot.

The subprime crash was under Labour.

You might struggle to get an NHS job, I’ve heard that all of NHS England are jumping ship and trying to get other NHS jobs, so the applicant numbers are way up on what they usually are.

He’s doing exactly the right thing going the T level apprentice route. If he wants to work in defence is there any cadet group or similar he could join? It would probably enhance his cv.

I stand corrected.

What's that supposed to mean?

I'm a disabled person who works, but fuck me is it hard to stay working and getting harder. I'm too young to retire, to poor to retire early, to old to retrain, too ill to work, too well to get benefits.

I'm exactly the the sort of person who going to end up in that "economically inactive" category, and I am pissed right off at the attitude that they are just people who can't be bothered to get a job.

Yip. They still have a better life working all hours of the day here /no holidays or sick days, than they left behind. So employers are snapping them up.

in one “family owned” care home I worked in, these young guys/carers would do a 12 hour shift (8am - 8pm) then go onto a night shift (8pm - 8am) then be back for a back shift (2pm -8pm). It was shocking.

Yep, it's brutal out there.
DH was made redundant before Easter and he's still not found a job. He's got nearly 30 years experience. He's applied for over 60 jobs and had less than a handful of interviews, we never in a million years thought it would take so long for him to find work. Still nothing on the horizon either, it's scary.