The jobs vacuum - where have the jobs all gone, where are the new workers? Automation and cost cutting partly responsible

Supposedly record numbers of jobs available?

Bullshit... here's why not!

We keep getting a tired media mantra of 'record numbers of jobs unfilled.' Well that's not really true.

The reality is that many of the jobs advertised are the same jobs multiple counted, often on many different job websites and agency listings. So the single job may be counted 10 or more times.

On the one hand there may be good news, older generations retiring are create new jobs, if they are advertised and not subsumed into the organisations that previously employed the retiree.

Since WW2, the generations that grew up in the 1950's and 1960's were able to choose family numbers, a no children option was more available from the Mid 1960's and in the 15 year generations of the 1970's, 80's 90's and into the 2000's, we have seen a growing number of couples, married or not, choosing not to have children. So, theoretically, 'new' workers will not be around, except that many migrants have filled that void.

Shrinking industries and changing industries

dictate how we work now and in the future

The legacy of 'choice' has meant that coupled with the mass onslaught of automation and robotics, that whilst a swathe of jobs should have become available through retirement, we have hit a perfect storm where filling 'dead men's shoes' jobs are much the norm.

The speculative employment to meet new growth is not there much anymore, a system of 'job and a half' where job specifications lump on a long list of 'requirements' on the employee, means that the employee will be overworked and be running round from arseholes to breakfast time trying to keep too many plates spinning.

The sum total of this farrago is that the job doesn't get done properly. This least cost option approach produces a mediocre result. Often the same jobs come up time and again because of this overwork.

Another factor is pure the 'least cost option' approach by employers, hiring the most junior and barely qualified people they can pay the least too. As we see, these jobs come up again and again because the employer did not employ the best candidate, only the cheapest.

The jobs vacuum has come from the perfect storm. Automation has taken many jobs and in the UK will take 9 million out of the workplace in the next 10 years. Your last 5 purchases were likely done on a computerised device, not in person.

Extrapolate that out over a week, month or year and that is where the jobs have gone from, the middle level of employees. That said, we now have machines that can learn and write, so SEO writing jobs and web optimisation will soon go to those too.

The 'new' workers are mainly the so-called millennial generation and a rare and becoming rarer commodity as further childlessness pervades.

The future to come is proxy living. The human in the workplace is already becoming irrelevant!

Unless you have transferable skills and skills that a robot doesn't currently have.