I'm stressed about the job market
- Maria Rosales Gerpe
- Jan 2
- 2 min read
I began this morning doing research for my company on statistics for Learning and Development (L&D), the industry I work in. Within minutes, my eyebrows furrow.
Working sounds stressful these days.
It's just that the way we work seems to be changing at a ridiculous pace...all thanks to AI. In just one year, Josh Bersin, Human Resources researcher and analyst, says that we've gone from 5% of companies experimenting with AI to almost all (95%) of them using it.
AI is certainly affecting how we work and already weeding out jobs. And not just any job: white collar jobs, you know, the ones you spent years educating yourself for?
In the same newsletter, Bersin quoted a Bloomberg study showing that the top 84 companies in the US reduced white collar headcount by 127, 418 people last year."
That includes IBM which then also laid off 3,900 marketing and communication jobs because of AI. Lovely. Are you perspiring yet? Maybe you are not a marketer.
A recent report by Adecco, the world's leading talent solutions and advisory company, found that more than 10% of workers had lost their job because of AI. Not to be pessimistic, but just as Michelle Weise predicts in her book "Life Long Learning," which I highly recommend to rethink the way you work and learn, we'll be seeing more of this disruption in the coming years.
In fact, according to the same Adecco study, which surveyed 35,000 workers across 27 countries and 20 industries, 40% of workers are worried about long-term job security. And they should be.
As it wrote recently, the numbers of long-term unemployment are increasing worldwide due to a mix of factors that include employer's reluctance to hire due to economic uncertainty and more complex talent acquisition requirements, given that AI is changing how we think about skills.
So buckle up because the future demands that we be resilient, abe to adapt to the rocky terrain ahead. And the hope is that employers, as Weise argues in "Long Life Learning," play a large role in re-training and re-educating --- known as upskilling and re-skilling in the L&D world --- their workforce, lest their workers choose to leave for better ventures.
Although most are wary of such transitions: 83% of workers plan to stay with their current employer.
Any time of major change can always seem scary, but it's also a time of steep learning curves, and opportunities for growth. Or so I tell myself to stave away my own fears.
So stay sharp, and continue learning. It's the only way ahead.
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