For many, along with the New Year resolutions and feelings of optimism for things to come, January is the time to consider changing jobs.
But sadly for them, January 2024 might not be the best time to go job hunting. After a period of steady growth throughout the first half of last year, salaries and vacancies fell significantly in the last six months.
For the first time since 2021, in fact, the number of UK vacancies has slumped below one million. “As we head into 2024, finding a job will likely stay tough for the first part of the year,” said Andrew Hunter, of job search engine Adzuna.
However, January is still a sensible month to look for new opportunities, according to Indeed, another job site. Hannah Keiling, of the website, said: “The new year inspires hiring managers to accomplish the tasks they’ve been putting off. Much of that inspiration originates from updated budgets that allow managers to make important decisions, such as hiring additional staff members.”
Last year has proven a turbulent time for the jobs market: at the start of 2023, jobseekers benefited from the highest availability of jobs and advertised salaries since 2021, according to Adzuna data.
But as sectors tighten their belts and artificial intelligence worms its way into workplaces, which jobs are set to dominate 2024, and which industries are already doomed? Telegraph Money crunched the numbers and asked the experts.
Roughly a year has gone by since the general public was given access to ChatGPT, the generative AI capable of churning out anything from improvised poetry to advanced code.
Quickly, the software was seized on by employers, and before the year was up artificially intelligent holograms were being marketed to companies looking to replace customer service staff with chatbots.
Jack Kennedy, Indeed’s chief economist, said that jobs to do with creating or using AI would continue to be popular in 2024. “As of the end of October, the share of UK job postings on Indeed mentioning terms related to generative AI stood at 0.05pc, a 26-fold increase since the start of the year,” he added.
“Though only five in 10,000 job postings mean genAI jobs aren’t yet common, they’re likely to continue to grow rapidly in 2024 and beyond as organisations integrate these tools into their businesses.”
Specific job titles to do with AI are already starting to emerge, according to Adzuna, adding that prompt engineers, AI ethics officers, and AI auditors are expected to be common job roles in the near future.
But the impact of AI has had a devastating effect on some workers in the tech industry. Listed salaries for ethical hackers (who test companies’ online security), for example, are half of what they were last year. Across a similar number of vacancies advertised, pay fell from £89,888 to £41,417.
If you believe Elon Musk, AI could one day replace the need for jobs entirely. In conversation with Rishi Sunak earlier this year, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, said: AI would be “the most disruptive force in the industry for jobs”, claiming that “there will come a point when no job is needed – you can have a job if you want to for personal satisfaction”.
A study by PwC found half a million British workers fear AI will impact their jobs within the next five years, while investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally in the coming years.
Some specialist jobs remain insulated from the threat of AI, however. Advertised salary data analysed by Adzuna this year found specialist medical professionals were less likely to have seen their pay impacted.
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