To think we need to start talking about the lack of jobs?

[Newmeagain]

This is prompted by quite a few threads I have read recently, from parents of young people looking for jobs or posters themselves struggling with finding a job.

I feel like a lot of responses are completely out of touch and people are not aware how hard it is right now. There are no “supermarket jobs” etc that you can just pick up.

I think this is having a particularly significant impact on school leavers and graduates looking for their first full time job, students wanting part time work and also anyone over 50 who suddenly finds themselves unemployed.

I have several friends with late teens/early 20's children and it is so hard for them to get that initial break that they can then build on as they find their way in the world.

Jobs are a problem everywhere to be honest. I know so many people who have been through recent restructures. My husband has been looking for a new role for nearly 2 years and not a sniff (currently in a senior board level job). There will be a lot of people staying put in jobs that don’t necessarily like out of fear at the moment which in turn reduces movement.

From our own perspective, our confidence in rehiring is low so we are trying to be sensible and despite being high earners, doing much less than I think people would expect eg we’ve cut back on eating out, we don’t have a cleaner, won’t go crazy on a holiday etc. our priority is school fees so basically our discretionary income is going there and not into the wider economy. We actually have planning permission for an extension but with mortgage rates as they are and job market uncertainty we wont be going ahead.

A stagnant job market leads to so many problems- youngsters can’t get a foot in the door but at the other end, people who actually have jobs are changing their behaviour and spending less, leading to reduced demand for services etc and the cycle of doom continues.

I work (and recruit) in Tech. Most our developers are Indian because they have more developed skills.

@charliehungerford Most of the UK testing team here are Indian too, pretty much all the the new hires. The odd exceptions of British people are those who have worked for a while and are close to retirement age. Overrepresented for our back end dev roles too, I presume they have very good CS educational background though as many will hhave multiple technical degrees

And then there is the security issue re data and language limitations. My dh has been really concerned and frustrated countless times re this and everything listed the previous posts. It’s concerning and ludicrous as we have many good quality CS graduates in the UK.

My husband doesn’t find this at all. Quite the reverse. It’s purely down to money and the fact teams in India are cheaper to employ on paper but the expensive cock ups and delays from poor quality code and lack of ability to problem solve costs ££££. They literally just hand any problems back to the few left in the UK to sort which causes massive pressures and delays that need not have happened.

Yes I had a very good well-paid career through working in a combination of business/IT. there were lots of projects, lots of perm jobs, lots of contract work too.

at one time graduates in tech would get numerous offers from banks, consultancies etc.

chickens are coming home to roost now in many ways.

We’re so reliant on US systems and cheap poor quality labour with big security issues. It really is going to bite us massively one day.

The US is spending extra ordinary amounts on salaries at the top end, I’ve seen offers of $750,000 to people with certain skill sets and security clearance
Whereas you think you could just employ 10 people at 75K who aren’t a fucking risk to homeland security in the first place and eliminate that problem
I guess that’s just too forward, thinking and wild for some people to consider

Well there's just too many people for the number of jobs. Employers truly have the upper hand now.

Well another big bear my dh has in this country is the ones with the desirable skills don’t always get the big salaries. Managers who can’t code and who don’t have the skills do instead. They screw up, repeatedly wasting money due to a lack of knowledge.

The national minimum wage goes up each year and, coupled with the rise in employer NI, it is more and more expensive to employ staff. Therefore businesses will do all they can to cut down on staff costs and automate whatever they can.

This is happening. It’s policy driven.

Just from my experience at my own company, some of the Indian staff are great to work with, hard workers and polite. A credit to the team

However I can also understand where your husband is coming from. There are some who on paper have impressive educational background, lots of qualifications etc, but in real life working scenarios they expect to be spoonfed and less adaptive to ‘real life’ work problems (a textbook can’t always give you the answer). I work in a non-technical role and my fav devs are the ones who are approachable and can translate technical things well. Some aren’t great at communicating concepts well causing delays.

I can’t say it out loud but I dread being assigned to projects with some of these less helpful workers. The british senior management think they’re getting a good deal and don’t care

& the Indian workers who are a credit to the team may still prefer working with people from their background even if it means tolerating weaker performers

It feels like a race to the bottom 😞 I had higher requirements for jobs when I was younger and less experienced than I am now

Maybe we could follow a Trumpian approach and put tarrifs on cheap imports of things like clothes to encourage factories to come back to the UK - make it cheaper to manufacture in the UK than to import. .

Hmm, and I wonder what led to the government needing to negotiate a new trade deal with India?

how on earth did you manage to get a mortgage up until you were nearly 82?!

Of course. Every time the minimum wage goes up another batch of roles reach the cost breakeven of automising them, or simply become uneconomic to do at all.

Right. The problem with the minimum wage is that to most people it sounds worthy and helpful, but it actually works against the people it is trying to help, and against businesses too..

Exactly. My local Tesco, they now don't open their tills until at least 8am on a Saturday, regardless of how much you are buying. You have to go through the self service tills. Even when they open them, there are not enough for the amount of customers. I remember a few years ago it was easy to get to a till quickly, it isn't now.

Australia has a higher minimum wage than we do and they just don’t seem to have these problems. I wonder what could be stemming the flow.

Does Australia have structural problems like working people claiming UC top ups? People working full time shouldn’t need top ups and the introduction of tax credits etc by the last Labour government has contributed to wage stagnation this century imo.

There are a lot of right wing business people/politicians wanting everyone back in the office

What has being right wing got to do with it?

For those with teens struggling to find work it might be worth contacting your loc FA football club. Ours was finding they were having to cancel so many matches due to lack of referees so did a big recruitment drive for junior refs and my DS has been qualified and working as one since he was 14. The club have made huge efforts (because so many refs for the younger players are now U18 themselves) to push the respect for referees, parents and in fact whole visiting teams are banned for the slightest sign of a greasing towards them, they’re really looked after an supported.

it’s also very flexible - matches at our club are generally on Saturdays, you say the week before if you can make it then they allocate. He can also travel to other matches in the country and gets paid more to be a linesman at Academy matches . You need a DBS check and to be FA qualified but it’s an easy enough process and good money and the addess benefit that then you gain experience working with young people, so now he’s in a good position to apply for summer camp jobs