Awful time to be in your 20s. Work wise anyway.
The unemployment rate is under 4%. Unless you’re in your 20s. Then it’s 12%.
You read that correctly.
This article on CNN (citing BLS statistics) popped up in my feed. There’s a few factors here:
👉No one wants to train employees when they can just hire people who can already do the job.
There’s plenty of data on this phenomenon. This article mentioned how training went from 2.5 weeks in 1979 to 11 hours in 1995 to only 20% of employees getting any training at all in 2011.
This had the unintentional consequence of workers going from spending their entire careers at one firm a couple generations ago to the average tenure of ~4 years now.
Everyone is just headhunting from everyone else.
👉Companies are in cost cutting mode.
The “do more with less” mindset has a bigger effect on those workers who can’t “do more” because they haven’t learned how yet. (Per the point above.)
Especially when there’s more tools than ever to do the lower level work. Which brings me to…
👉AI is a lot of hype, except where it isn’t.
It’s never been easier to automate the boring stuff. In software development, tools like Copilot and ChatGPT allow engineers to work faster and more efficiently. Several senior level devs I know have commented that entry level dev work could be in a lot of trouble if tools keep improving at this pace.
And it’s the same for a lot of other skill areas. But it brings up the big concern…
👉If there’s less junior level workers now, who’s going to do the senior level work in the future?
Skilled labor ain’t getting any younger. At some point, the economics of training and hiring will have to change out of necessity and the market will normalize.
But that doesn’t help anyone right now.
Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.
