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

I'm currently unemployed and can confirm, it's awful! I'm 25+ years experienced in my field, c-suite level. I've applied for around 60 roles I'd say over the last few months and only two of those progressed past the CV stage.

Companies just don't have the budgets they did. Many are also now on the AI train and it's all about creating efficiencies without adding head count. They started outsourcing to cheaper locations years back and despite public opinion, persist with the model because it brings huge savings and hasn't damaged their revenues- at least not to the extent that it's worth undoing. Covid changed alot because so many roles now are not tied to a location, you're going to get more applications. And the dreaded AI CV screening...it was inevitable but it's beyond frustrating to get an automated response to an application which you know a human has never seen. For me, age doesn't help. What 38 year old chief of something wants to manage a 50 year old woman who used to be a chief of something? I'll be honest, if I was that 38 year old hiring manager I'd be giving my CV a suspicious scan too.

Perhaps ironically, my experience over the last decade has been purely around moving work to AI powered workflows, much of it abroad in cheaper countries. So technically speaking I have the exact experience so many companies are looking for right now yet, here I am... I chose to leave my job and I don't regret it but it's still been a shock to the system.

Despite all that, I'm optimistic. Roles will change, but humans will become even more valuable precisely because of the AI shift. We are already seeing that pattern emerge in some sectors. It's unfortunate for those it impacts right now because we're the guinea pigs, we know what the world of work looked like before but we're not quite sure what it'll look like in the future. The following generations will be clearer on this once things have settled.

The last time we handed out money to people who weren't working... furlough... it didn't end so well. Caused a bit of inflation i hear...

I've seen one job I applied for (outside of Linkedin) and actually received a rejection email for still advertised six months later.

Most of it I think is data gathering, there isn't actually a job. I think the government need to ban offering a job where there isn't one available, like they are introducing having to state a salary. Hard to enforce.

Very difficult to tell the difference between real jobs that get pulled and fake jobs. We just advertised a role didn't get decent applicants and now they are having second thoughts whether they can afford the skills needed so job has been pulled for a re think, possibly not to proceed at all, but it was real initially.

@Booklin ”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.”

The Indians know exactly their value. India is rapidly becoming more expensive to hire, and they job hop to get decent pay rises.
My company have opened 2 offices there, and are struggling like crazy to recruit because they did the maths 2 years ago and are now advertising jobs that are no longer competitively priced.
It’s an economy on the rise.

The companies will literally own the government.

Big companies, plutocrats, banks and the financial markets really run the world, not governments.

Dd 24 has been a primary svhool teacher on a rolling ftc for 3 years. Her school refuced the number of classes so as the only one on a part time contract she's out of work in September. She interviewed for 8 jobs and every one said the same thing. Theyve gone with someone with like 10 + yrars experience. What's she supposed to do about that? At what point does not having
At least she had interviews. Lots of her peers ate not getting any. Some schools told her they had had 30+ applications.
I hope she can pick up some supply work next term

i work at Amazon and the vast majority of people there are Indian. I’d say about 98%. Local people can’t get in because bots are snapping up the jobs applications then selling them for £200. You don’t have an interview for Amazon just some English tests so they are guaranteed a job.

I work in tech. We’re in a growth stage at the moment and actively recruiting for many positions - and they have to be UK-based to work for the UK function. That’s our group policy mainly because of legal and visa issues etc, so it’s not across the whole sector.

Saying that, I know people looking for jobs in certain job functions who have been looking for months and months. It’s very disheartening.

I am struggling to find a decent job too at 55 and with a disability

All I have had in the past year after having to leave my permanent job are freelance contracts with small businesses.

One for six month which was great but it was a small business that was struggling financially with clients cutting down on spending because of the cost of living so they could not continue to give me work.

The one I am in at the moment is awful which my invoices being paid late and I am leaving it next week as I can't sustain this much longer.

I have a degree, reached a level of Head of Team/Assistant Director in my careers but I barely get any reply to applications and have had only a handful of interviews in the past three months.

Adding AI to the recruitment process is making it harder to have your CV seen and the employer national insurance increased combined with customers cutting spending due to the high cost of living have put such a burden on businesses that they can't/won't hire anymore.

The government needs to do more to help older workers back in employment (if they want to increase the age when you can claim a pension then we need to be able to continue working...) and do more to support people who want to start and continue to run businesses.

Also mentioning a disability in an application probably means that it goes to the bin so again when people keep complaining about disabled people not working what are we supposed to do?

A dreadful mess all around.

It is very tough for young people trying to get a first job, especially one that has career development opportunities. It's tough for people being made redundant with senior management experience as numbers of tiers of management are being reduced. But they are jobs out there that nobody wants, mainly because they are both demanding and low paid. I don't actually think it's minimum wage that is the problem, it's the lack of definite career prospects.

I can't think of any magic solutions but if I were younger I'd be looking abroad in my chosen field, or retraining for a job that can't be done by AI in the next decade..

Skills are what employers want, not meaningless qualifications. Nobody cares about your Geography or English degree. Most kids these days cant even drive.

If I train up an English grad then chances are they'll move on to another company 1-2 years later and I'll have lost them as soon as they start becoming useful. It's too high risk. Also, while it's not fair to tar everyone with the same brush, the stereotypes about younger people being flaky and clocking in and out like factory workers are often accurate. On top of that there's AI - why pay a 23 year old to do mediocre work when I can get Claude to do it?

If someone presented me with a smart, capable grad who was willing to push themselves and be a bit of a grafter and had great communication skills then I'd hire them. But they're tough to find.

I think part of the conversation about work inevitably needs to include discussion on education. We are the most educated we've ever been after years of cross party force feeding us 'education, education, education' , there aren't the jobs to match. I have a Masters degree that means nothing. I don't even match essential criteria for a jobs 1 level above my own. I am the only one with a masters degree in my team, others have got A levels/Highers. I'm paying off a student loan when I didn't need it. I'm a single mum and I thought it would help me earn more for my family, I've ended up with less.

In my previous job (supermarket) decent people like myself- bullied by the store manager left. Hardly any replacements. Probably with 12-16 hour contracts which doesn’t entice many and students got them. They weren’t skilled in the multitude of things I did.

Also doesn’t help when the bully store manager only recruited people from his own religion. They were next to useless. Putting a chilled coffee drink in the ambient new lines section in the warehouse, splitting up multi packs of water and putting them in the single bottles. Then putting dog food in the cat food. There is a photo of a dog on the pack FFS!

Yes, and the more middle level/experienced jobs that were still in the UK are now going to India.

Didn't Elon also say there'd be 1 million people living on Mars by 2050?
I can't see Mars being habitable to a million people in 24 years from now.
He doesn't always get it right.

Yet try getting a trade like a plumber or an electrician, get a window fixed, get anyone to come out to your house and they are all too busy!

My mum's currently having interviews for nursing roles, being told 'we'll phone you tomorrow' and then never hearing a word again until she chases it up, it's wrong. People taking the time to prep for and attend an interview and they can't even send a second-long rejection email, in a so-called 'caring' industry.

I think AI is an enormous threat, companies are embracing it and we are sleep walking into a disaster.

I really worry for my kids and the jobs they can do: this will affect every area of our lives as we will have a generation of people unable to holiday, drive and have their own kids

All those that demanded wfh - insisting there was no need to be present in the office - everything could be done remotely- well it seems employers were listening. Why pay for expensive uk workers to wfh?

Not true. I work in this area, the job market is equally bad. It's flooded with people qualified to the eyeballs but entry level jobs aren't there anymore, and experienced roles are getting rarer unless you're at director level.

AI is wrecking things here too. I've got pretty good at spotting a risk assessment written by AI. And theyre not an improvement on a real person doing it.

My husband has just been made redundant from a job in the advertising sector. This thread makes me very worried. He has good practical skills and i'm seriously thinking of encouraging him to retrain and go down the 'trades' route.

I work for a global bank. I had managed somehow to hold onto my job during all the offshoring to India, Poland and other low cost locations, but can see AI is coming for my job now even though I am fairly senior. I am in my 50s so no idea what I am going to do for money when that happens.

It’s end stage capitalism. These companies will not exist without customers. Capitalism is eating itself.

It's a serious, serious worry.

I'd not be sharing my knowledge with anyone in India in those circumstances. I'd be going off sick for the remainder of my notice period and fuck 'em.

This has been 50 years in the making. Can’t just blame Labour, the Cons are all over the state of the country as well.