LONDON: Artificial intelligence (AI) has raised the stakes of taking your first step up the career ladder \u2013 and made it tougher and costlier than ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Georgie Blackburn, a Gloucestershire-based career coach, is one of the few beneficiaries. In a two-decade career advising everyone from senior executives to military leavers, she said most of her clients today are young people fresh out of university, up from just one in 10 two years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI have seen it as a growth area for my business,\u201d said Blackburn, whose early-careers services can cost up to \u00a3750 (US$1,010) and may direct people to volunteer work, internships or online courses to build experience. \u201cA degree is not enough on its own, never has been, but even more so today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The situation is particularly dire in Britain, where a youth-unemployment rate of 16.4% is the highest in a decade, and is rising faster than in any other G-7 country. The graduate premium over the minimum wage has been cut in half since 2007.<\/p>\n
In response, the UK government is increasingly paying employers to take on young workers.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has expanded his predecessor\u2019s jobs-guarantee scheme, subsidising minimum-wage roles for 18 to 24-year-olds who\u2019ve been claiming unemployment benefits for 18 months or more.<\/p>\n
The government has also introduced a grant of \u00a33,000 per job for employers who hire young people who have been unemployed for a shorter time.<\/p>\n
Burnham has promised to overhaul vocational training so that \u201cBritain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap\u201d.<\/p>\n
Entry-level jobs have always been the first to disappear in downturns, from the industrial crises of the 1970s to the aftermath of the financial crash, when youth unemployment climbed to 22.5%.<\/p>\n
Yet, the forces behind the current slump run deeper than US President Donald Trump\u2019s war in the Middle East and Labour\u2019s recent tax rises and increases in the minimum wage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mostly it\u2019s AI. The spread of bots has broken down traditional paths into the workforce by taking away the grunt work.<\/p>\n
Fresh graduates have little more to offer than their willingness to spend hours sifting through documents or formatting slides. Even someone with just a year of experience has an advantage if they snapped up some knowledge that AI can\u2019t easily replicate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI optimists argue that the technology frees up juniors to do more interesting and valuable work, but the view that AI will reduce entry-level roles is becoming mainstream in business circles.<\/p>\n
The share of bosses who hold that opinion has doubled to 40% over the last two years, according to an Accenture report.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This risks leaving firms without people to promote into management positions in a few years. But for now, a tough economic backdrop and open questions over how AI will reshape the workplace are keeping employers focused on reducing costs.<\/p>\n
Banks and consulting firms are shrinking graduate classes, while hedge funds that once hired three junior analysts to sift through company filings now need only one person to oversee an AI model.<\/p>\n
A King\u2019s College London study found that job cuts at firms with AI-exposed staff were mostly concentrated in junior roles.<\/p>\n
A third of young Britons have taken on unpaid work, accepted jobs below their qualifications or worked outside their preferred career to gain experience, a higher proportion than in France and Germany, according to a Linkedin survey of 18 to 29-year-olds within the first three years of their careers.<\/p>\n
The United Kingdom should consider moving away from on-the-job learning toward more training upfront, much like airline pilots who train extensively before ever flying a real plane, said Raoul Ruparel, senior director at the Boston Consulting Group\u2019s Centre for Growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a way to to borrow and invest in your education, less of a way to do that for first jobs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Desperate times are producing desperate ideas. Jacob Schaal, a 24-year old research assistant at King\u2019s College London and recent graduate himself, has come up with a policy proposal that looks a lot like the UK\u2019s student-loan system to help finance entry into a first job.<\/p>\n
In his model, young people would cede 1% of future earnings for the next 25 years to whoever employs them in their first five years in the workforce, even after they leave the company.<\/p>\n
Remarkably, recent graduates don\u2019t instantly dismiss it upon hearing about it.<\/p>\n
Not even a month after graduating with an accounting and management degree from Queen Mary University in London, 22-year-old Maria Adnung is already frustrated by lengthy, automated recruitment processes. And the \u201cfirst job\u201d funding idea sounds almost intriguing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe company is taking not only probably your dignity, but 1% of your salary,\u201d Adnung said. \u201cWith how desperate I am for a job, I probably would say yes.\u201d \u2014 Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON: Artificial intelligence (AI) has raised the stakes of taking your first step up the career ladder \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[1418,254,29,183,3481,5,6],"class_list":["post-104792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-ai","tag-economy","tag-employment","tag-labour","tag-tech","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117108250128385525","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}