Employment is often regarded as a status symbol. But they are also necessary to live as an adult. Whether for status or survival, jobs have become increasingly difficult to obtain and retain.
This trend of job decline is due to three main factors: economic uncertainty among companies, the rise of an AI workforce, and increased job criteria.
Companies are cutting people and their listings more than ever due to recent economic instability. President Trump is arguably the driving force behind most of this, with his economic policies centred on imposing tariffs; the BBC reported a 50% increase in imports from India and Brazil, and CNN said he is now threatening China with tariffs up to 130%. By making the price of imported goods fluctuate, companies are forced to consider how to reduce costs, usually starting with their workers. According to a recent CNN article, “Manufacturing employment has declined four months in a row, according to the August jobs report released last Friday. The US manufacturing industry has 78,000 fewer jobs than it did a year ago, BLS data shows.”
The potential rise of the AI workforce is prompting companies to consider layoffs. Generative AI has been heavily invested in and is becoming increasingly prevalent in the world of work, not just as a tool but to automate as much labour as possible. An article by the World Economic Forum predicts that “41% [of employers] plan to reduce their workforce as AI automates certain tasks. Almost half of employers expect to transition staff from roles exposed to AI disruption into other parts of their business, an opportunity to alleviate skills shortages while reducing the human cost of technological transformation.”
There are approximately 37,000 Amazon employees in Georgia. In a statement written by the senior vice president of Amazon, Beth Galetti, she says that they intend “an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles,” citing the reason for this being “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”
At the same time, all jobs have increasingly stringent requirements in recent years.
For example, this job as a student researcher was posted by Google on LinkedIn. According to its description, one would take on an engineering or scientific role in research projects to “drive scientific advancement across a multitude of research areas.” The job’s minimum requirements are to be enrolled in a bachelor’s or master’s degree program in a technical field (Linguistics, Statistics, Biostatistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Economics, Natural Sciences) and to have a basic understanding of computer science.
The minimum requirements make sense, but the job’s preferred qualifications are notable. These include enrollment in a full-time degree program, experience as a researcher, experience publishing papers at major conferences or journals, and experience with more than one programming language.
Getting a feasible chance at acquiring this job would require you to have a four to six-year degree plus any number of these optional requirements. This trend in requirements applies to the majority of those seeking employment, which is especially difficult for recent college graduates.
Jobs like these are making it harder for teens and others to enter the workforce. 19-year-old, Georgia Tech sophomore Jayden Xiong says, “But those are the only ones that I got like an interview for, and then there’s like there’s a lot more [where] I applied and never got back to me.”
He continued, “That kind of stuff, they’re looking for people with more experience. I feel like I have enough qualifications to get an interview. I don’t have enough qualifications to actually get the position because I don’t have the experience that other applicants have.”
