Job market is awful

[Flowerpowerz]

I work in pharma (general field) and the job market is horrendous. I’m seeing a huge trend towards AI which is not surprising. Perhaps more concerning is the massive uptick of offshore partners aka shipping work out to India because they are cheaper than people in the uk and USA. I have several friends in several related companies (technology, IT, coding) that have lost jobs due to this. They are being expected to share knowledge with their Indian colleagues before their redundancy kicks in.

I have honestly never known it so bad. My linked in is a sea of “open to work”

is it just me or has anyone else noticed these trends? It’s worse than ever

No not naïve at all. Nail on head.

Capitalism causes one crisis after another. One of the contradictions is that the total value of goods and services created through our labour can not be bought back, there will always be a surplus. AI and robots is not another crisis, this is a revolution to the mode of production and you are right, if people lack the resources to consume then any products and services will be surplus....thus creating crisis. But this will be different I think because it won't just be the impoverished immiserated masses marching it will be the owners of the means of production demanding governments plug the gap and shore up demand by adopting a system such as UBI.

This is the way things have always been throughout history. Empires rise and fall. No country stays on top permanently.

I was listening to an economics expert discuss this recently. He said that as a tiny country, we should never have had the power and influence that we did. We just got lucky because we were the first country to industrialise. However, that period was an anomaly, and we are now in decline.

I think the next superpowers will be in Asia. China or India.

Being a "Graduate" is worth nothing these days. People need to realise that having a degree is more of a hindrance, everyone has one in something or other. There is no Graduate Premium anymore. Skills are what employers want, not meaningless qualifications. Nobody cares about your Geography or English degree. Most kids these days cant even drive. I'm not being negative, but realistically, being 25, with a generic degree, no driving licence and no real experience in any job, is a pass for most employers. We fucked a whole generation of young people by telling them they needed a Degree.

And the government is doing everything it can to kill the employment market by regulation. They have made it so expensive and so legally difficult to hire new.people that the market is stuck. Nobody can afford to hire. That's the government fault. Blame them. Older people are struggling because companies are struggling. And in the world of corporate non-jobs, the problem is even worse. As Elon said "it turns out you dont need that many people".

What do you do within pharma? I’m in same sector and have seen an uplift in hiring in recent months within my function. Lots of companies re-orging at the moment which means cuts in some areas but lots of hiring in others.

really difficult with so many people in flux, but overall outlook increasingly positive.

UBI is really unemployment benefit. And it wont work. If the govis funded by a handful of tech companies, democracy is a dead concept. The companies will literally own the government. If UBI is set at subsistence levels, it's just communism. If it's set at a "luxury" level, you get rampant inflation. Neither of those scenarios allow for the consumer economy the tech companies need to generate the tax required to pay UBI. You could argue some sort of sovereign wealth fund, but again, that needs consumers to spend money to generate the wealth to pay the sovereign fund. And perpetual motion doesn't work.

Its horrible atm. In a way I'm lucky ish now. I'm an IT trainer, ive been using various AI for a couple of years. I'm now doing AI training courses for people who are not confident with AI.
If you work in a company AI should not take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI to do the boring/repetitive work will take your job. AI is a tool but will always need the human touch.
The company I work for is seeing a uptick of Soft Skill training.

I'm worried about my dds, luckily 1 is off to uni but doing Medicine so hopefully not replaceable.

Clearly Elon can't count. There cant be a limitless increase in productivity because there is a finite population. Once we all buy a new car, a new house new clothes, what then? "High level UBI is just unemployment benefit.

Globalism is a disaster. It's destroying countries and societies, and the planet too.

Its Government jobs as well, NS&I, Nest, the courts service, - a lot of jobs are outsourced to consultancies who offshore the work. Plus consultancies like KPMG who a few years back might have a couple of hundred young software developers have outsourced that work offshore.

@LooneyLiberalSpaceWaster Your instinct is pointing toward a real structural tension inside capitalism. However you’re also identifying something genuinely new about the AI/automation moment. This makes it different from other social revolutions such as the Industrial Revolution or the end of feudalism. The concise takeaway is that automation doesn’t just intensify the classic crisis of under‑consumption. It threatens to make capital itself dependent on state‑manufactured demand This is why you’re right that owners may end up demanding something like UBI.

Automation changes the composition of the workforce itself. If AI and robots replace labour at scale, then the traditional mechanism of paying workers less than the value they create breaks down. Workers cease to be the primary consumers. Capital needs buyers but automation removes the ability of buyers to consume. Capitalists are discovering that their own system cannot function without mass purchasing power..

While I think there is a lot of truth in this, degrees were supposed to be about learning to critically think and transferable skills.

i think it was here, some while ago, that a thread about what was your degree and what do you do now (or similar question) and lots of people who did a history degree had gone on to become accountants. As an example.

Hopefully people still value critical thinking and transferable skills but maybe not so much?

The pay, too. Pay is so low now. The charity sector is abysmal.

Planned obsolescence? Some products will deliberately be made not to last and some will just fall out of fashion. And people will keep buying more stuff, as they have been taught to. This year’s car, this season’s clothes, a bigger house to fill with stuff…

Aren’t we partly responsible? If we shopped on the high street we would have shop jobs. We would have a high street.

Instead ‘we’ buy cheap, poor quality, poorly made products from online markets.

Even better if we buy British instead of products made cheaply in China.

Sadly it is becuase of the Ni raise and business rates. We have just had to make 3 people redundant at my office very reluctantly but we just need to cut costs. If the government cut business rates in half and reduced NI by 2% we’d be hiring right now. Margins are just so very tight right now. If I was in government I’d be slashing employer taxes in a heartbeat- things will not improve until they do that.

A friend senior in a British bank told me recently that at her bank all the offshoring that happened 20 years ago, hiring people in India etc…they’re now being made redundant and replaced by AI

Blame Rachel Reeves and Angela Raynor for making it so expensive to hire minimum wage workers, getting rid of any advantage in hiring younger workers and giving employee rights from day 1 so there's too much risk in hiring someone at entry level.

Combine that with runaway mass immigration, since the 90s (which both main parties are to blame for).

Tbh if you voted Labour and now can't get a job, or your kids can't, I have limited sympathy.

I know many people hate the idea, but i
I can't help but think that the answer to rising unemployment and increasingly poor public services will ultimately lie in having those out of work deploy their skills for the public good in return for a reformed unemployment benefit, with an uplift to recognise their work. It would allow people to keep their skills up to date and build experience whilst improving the country for the benefit of society as a whole.

I think the key would be to make sure people are in relevant areas so they feel it is worthwhile. So, for example, could unemployed IT specialists be deployed to help schools with outdated and crumbling IT systems yet no funds or expertise to sort them out?

I appreciate it's really complex, and if it wasn't done right it would result in more people losing their jobs as they get replaced by cheaper "unemployed" workers. But I think there has to be a solution there somewhere. A bit like the idea of a universal basic income, but having people deploy their skills for the good of society in return. I think we will ultimately have to move away from such an indivualist society if we're going to make things work in the future.

Honestly yes, and it's getting worse. I call financial companies for work and most are in India or Phillipines. Maybe 2 or 3 have local call centre staff. The WFH covid change up did this. I went to an industry staff day & was shocked most companies in our field use AI or off shore processing & have very few staff. We don't and are actually getting busier as clients comment on our service & ability to talk to a person who knows their accounts.

Also, a client has just lost their job as director at a child care (nursery) centre. Replaced by an AI administration system. No idea how they are supposed to manage staff. Most here are very transient & poorly paid so it's constant.

Agree. The Indians, and everyone else, are worried about these call center jobs.
AI is destroying them.

It's not quite just 'luck' that was the reason the industrial revolution properly started in the UK. It would be quite a coincidence if the industrial revolution, developing empiricism, discovering antibiotics, inventing radio and the television all just happened to be on one small set of islands. The western wold in general has been the forefront of innovation for the past several hundred years and never in the history of our species have things changed faster or has life been better. I don't think that trajectory is likely to change in our lifetimes, at least.

Loads of our support roles in finance and IT are moving to India. The attitude is you can get 4 replaceable heads for the same as one head in the UK, plus they will be someone who doesn't know their rights or their value. Whilst the work wont be perfect, the savings are considered worth it.

I took a massive pay cut when looking myself and got lucky. I do work long hours plus im careful about not sharing everything I know now. Companies are ruthless.

Job market is awful. Doesn’t help when AI is used to filter CVs and application forms.

AI does not understand transferable skills. Applied for jobs which done the tasks/duties bits in one job and from others. Didn’t get a look in.

I think AI selects the wrong people and they can’t cope etc. Hence why 12 weeks later, saw the same job being advertised again.

it took me 10 months to get a job and waited another 10 weeks to get the checks done- civil service before I was working.

Getting rid of AI in recruitment will get more people through the next stage who are borderline and able to sift out those who look good on CV but bad in practice. I wonder if any employers has noticed a change in the type of people they recruit and how long if they last for. If turnover has increased a lot, need to investigate that

The worst thing I did was an online interview with about 25 questions and had to record the answers once and was timed. 2 mins per question. Some didn’t need two minutes such as do you have pre booked holidays. The STAR questions weren’t. Not suitable for dyslexics. I didn’t get passed that stage

LinkedIn is a fucking shitshow. I blame it for creating at least some of the problems in the market through the use of AI and "easy apply".

I work in HR and this has a name...restructure by attrition. Basically see how you make do after people leave as you can't get budget to backfill. We even have a list of not to replace roles already identified, although at least we are not at the point of enforcing redundancies