The Job Market Has Changed

This video is what I would tell myself if I were starting a career or rethinking my career today. Man, it is rough out there these days. Like seriously, it's crazy. I've been more plugged in with a younger crowd these days, like people in their 20s mostly. And I'm just sitting here like watching in shock as fresh graduates from top 10 universities with like the highest honors go for a year and not be able to find a job or working part-time and just being undermployed. and people who have a few years of experience too, just like getting laid off completely out of the blue and traditionally from very safe and prestigious institutions like in consulting banks, tech companies, the quote unquote safe jobs. I recently also learned that apparently the unemployment rate for Harvard Business School grads is 23%. That sounds kind of shocking, but like I'm not even shocked at this point, I guess. Anyways, this is all really quite terrible as an understatement. So, I've been really thinking about this and like researching and looking at reports and articles from the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc., to just really like get a better understanding of what's going on here. And in this video, I want to share some of the things that I learned, as well as some of my thoughts on how I would be approaching my career if I were to be starting or rethinking my career today, which by the way is actually really different than what I did um from 2017 to 2020ish when I was doing my career change stuff. So the good news though is that I promise you it is not just like all doom that I will be sharing today because I have also witnessed people and actually work with people in their 20s and 30s as well who are actually doing really well for themselves. It's not like these people are particularly smarter than everybody else. They are people who understand that the traditional path is really no longer a thing and have learned to reframe and approach their careers in a different perspective. But first we need to understand two key trends that both explain the current job market and can help us come up with a plan for how to navigate it. This is a receipt from a restaurant. As we can see, there is a

food tax and also a beverage tax. Okay, fine. This is relatively normal in the US. But this is where it gets crazy. Okay, you see there's also an 18% mandatory tip. And the audacity of this, an additional suggested gratuitity on top of the total amount. Man, I get triggered just like looking at this. I swear every time I go to the US, it just like gets worse. Anyways, this is becoming increasingly more common these days and it's just one symptom that showcases how crazy expensive the cost of living is these days. We also can't just go blame businesses. Oh, it's like you guys are just, you know, trying to pass everything to consumer. It's also not because they want to do this. The cost of maintaining businesses is also crazy high these days. And this is not just like a US North America situation, right? It is a global phenomenon. In fact, the World Economic Forum, the WF 2025 future of jobs report states that low-income countries are disproportionately affected by rising inflationary pressures because of elevated food prices, crazy high cost of living and cost of maintaining businesses. Keep all of this in mind. Okay. Now, let's talk about the second underlying trend which probably nobody will be surprised by because, drum roll please, it is the development of technology, specifically AI and data processing technology. According to the WF future of jobs report, technological advancement is the single biggest macroeconomic trend that is influencing job markets. Out of a thousand survey companies across 22 industries and 55 economies, 60% of these companies say that it is significantly changing how they're doing business, including hiring. But the interesting thing though is that there's actually mixed reports on whether AI is actually transforming businesses in their operations and productivity. I actually really dug into this and I'll link some of the resources below if you want to check it out yourself. But basically the narrative is that if you ask a company pretty much like any company, hey like what is AI doing within your company, they will tell you that oh like AI is transforming my company for the better. It's like you know making everybody more productive and it's doing things that humans used to do. Amazing. And this is definitely true for some companies that actually have a really fleshed out and implemented AI strategy. But perhaps for most companies though it might not be the case. They're probably just saying it because it's what other people expect them to say. It makes them look like they're doing better and their stock prices will go up. Also, they're able to hide the fact that they're not hiring additional people because AI is a really good reason for not doing that. This report by McKenzie estimates that only about 1% of companies actually has a AI strategy that has reached maturity. But regardless of whether AI is actually doing this or not, at the very minimum, there is a perception that AI can and will replace jobs. And actually just that perception itself is enough for companies to slow down their hiring. Of course, there are many other factors that's contributing towards the jobs market including things like geopolitical tensions, cough stuff in the US like the H-1B situation. And if you want to dive deeper into this, I also linked a WF future of work 2025 report that goes into a lot of detail about this in the description. But for now, for us, this is enough for us to go off on. At this point, we can kind of understand the landscape where prices are really high and just things are really expensive right now, which is causing people to not want to hire. And because of technological advancements, or the perceived technological advancements, it's also causing people to be more hesitant about hiring. Now, you may be tempted at this point to then go a step further and say, "Wow, everything is terrible. Woe is me. I guess I should probably just give up because the economy is horrible. " a war. Maybe I should like retrain to go into AI or technology or something, right? No. Stop. Stop. Hold it. No. Bad idea. Firstly, you should never give up. — But I work hard and I never give up. — And secondly, don't just be like, "Okay, I'm going to go learn about like technology now because just having the degrees in technology isn't actually going to get you anywhere. In fact, the unemployment rate for technology graduates is 27% higher than the general unemployment rate. So, literally, it's worse because all the layoffs are actually coming from tech. But wait, there is one more very interesting phenomenon that I want to tell you about that fundamentally transformed the way that I view the job market and my strategy if I were to start my career today. H there is a very strange dilemma that seems to be happening as we just talked

about. On one hand, there is a lot of people who cannot get jobs, but on the other hand, there's actually also a lot of employers who say that they cannot fill jobs. Like they literally have job openings that they cannot fill. Here's a table that shows the trend of the global labor shortage from 2013 until 2024. We can see that it's increasing and that there was a big jump during the pandemic which hasn't actually decreased. Now, this might sound really puzzling to you, and it definitely is, but I'm personally actually not really surprised by this because this is the exact same problem that I have. For example, I've been trying to hire a full-time editor and a producer for over a year now. I also have a lot of contracting availabilities, too. And this is just not like a me thing as well. I'm in a bunch of different entrepreneur and business groups where people are always complaining about not being able to find talent. So, what is going on here? As you may not be surprised to hear, I'm chronically online. And for the past few months, I've been using Perplexity's Comet, which is their free AI agentic web browser. And I got to tell you, it is really, really cool. Like, in the beginning, I didn't really get it. I'm like, why do I need an AI web browser? There's actually like a lot of use cases that are really, really useful. So, that's why today I'm really excited to share with you guys some of my favorite use cases. And did I mention it is completely free right now? Let's check it out. All right, so this is Comet and as you can see I have many tabs open because I am currently learning about investing and this is really common for me like just having like a lot of tabs open which I'm sure many of you guys can relate to. So what some one of the really cool things that comma can do. So here I just open the assistant. I can actually say summarize all the tabs that I have open and provide key insights from each of them. And I can let that run. By the way, it's in Japanese right now because I happen to be in Japan. So, we'll let it do that in the background. And in the meantime, I'm going to show you the second use case. This one is really, really nifty and will save you some money. So, pay attention. Here I have I Herb, which is where you can buy um a lot of supplements and things like that. And I added a bunch of things to cart because apparently I should be taking more supplements. And there's like this place with promo code, right? So, I don't really have any promo codes. But what I can do is say, as the comet assistant, try out promo codes for me, and it will do it. It's like testing out different promo codes to try to find you the best one. Cool. After it did everything, it tells you everything that I tried, all these different working promo codes, and it found that the best one is the one that's 20% off supplements. So, it applied this one, and there you go. You were able just to save 20% like this. So, you can proceed to checkout. Now, checking back to our summaries, we can see that it summarized all of the tabs. So, I'm actually currently looking at different courses and different information that people have cuz I'm looking specifically at investing and how AI is impacting investing. So, it's telling me, okay, there's financial technology, fintech, innovations from Corsera, what is about the key insights and all the other tabs that I have open as well. And at the very end, it says, if you want any deep dive summary, specific actionable advice, and I can actually go in and dive deeper into any of the tabs that I want to. One more use case. Okay, say you're on Instagram and you see this photo and you're like, "Wow, I really like that dress. " You can ask something like, "Where can I get the dress that the model is wearing? " And it will tell you the dress worn by the model is likely from the Chinese fashion brand Urban Revivo. You are. In a related Instagram post, she mentioned that most of the outfits people ask about are from Urban Revival and it's a frequent go to store when she returns to China. So yeah, I can actually go and try to go buy a teapot. Really cool, right? You don't have to like scroll through all the comments and finally say you are now done with everything your tal browsing then you can write please close all the tabs and there you go done with your browsing sessions pretty handy right comment is free right now so if you want to try it out the link is in the description now back to the video well first of all I do want to acknowledge that the state of the job market is in fact actually bad like objectively worse because the number of job availabilities is in fact lower than previously but it's also not the case that there's just no jobs available And this is my hypothesis, okay? I just want to like say that very clearly. My hypothesis, not verified, not other people's opinions. Take it with a grain of salt. I think it's because the world is progressing at an increasingly faster pace, which means that the skill sets that are in demand is also progressing at a really fast pace. Like technological skills like AI was not expected just like a couple years back. So what's happening is that for people who are going through like traditional education, they're simply not learning the right skill sets that employers are looking for. And remember we talked about the socioeconomic trend of prices being really high, businesses are also struggling. So they're becoming more conservative, right? Well, when the economy is bad and business are being conservative, but the first thing they try to do is try to decrease their investments. And guess what? Training new people, training new hires is like the ultimate investment. So they're not willing to just like invest in a fresh graduate and teach them these skills over time for them to actually become a productive, useful member of the team. They want people that already have these skill sets, which is a high bar. Absolutely. But as an employer, I also do absolutely agree with the statement because for me, not going to lie, if I'm going to hire someone, like I would expect them to be able to keep up with the pace of our team. Otherwise, it would be like a bigger burden to have that person than to not have that person at all. So, I would actually rather just keep the spot vacant as opposed to hire someone who I don't think is qualified enough. And then I would just spend that like extra money and energy to continue investing in AI as a company and automating more things. There, I said it. That is the truth. And I do think this is a sentiment that is probably shared by a lot of employers right now. Things are not that great. So don't want to invest but still have the expectation that hires actually already have the skills and would rather just not hire at all than hire someone who is not skilled. Okay, so I promise I'll come back to this point and explain how to

actually navigate this situation then. And I promise there is a way. But first I do want to take a look at exactly what skills are we talking about here? Like what is it that companies are actually looking for these days that allegedly people don't have? — You must be good at something. — Well, the fastest growing desirable skill, no surprises here, according to the WF 2025 report, is AI and big data, followed by networks and cyber security and other technological skills. Also very high up on that list though is resilience, flexibility, and agility along with leadership and social influence. Soft skills. Also interesting to note that the skill of lifelong learning is quickly ascending the ranks for the 2025 to 2030 period. Dang it, you're actually expected to continuously learn. Now, there are also these visualizations from McKenzie's AI report that I thought was really interesting. These are apparently example visualizations of the ideal worker skill profiles in a human agentic workforce. Like a human agentic workforce is the type of workforce that we can see a lot of workplaces shifting towards where humans are working alongside AI and AI agents. The M-shaped general manager builds, supervises, optimizes hybrid workflows, has endto-end product or process responsibility. They have knowledge across multiple domains, social emotional abilities like communication and like managing people's emotions and stuff like that. AI and then finally higher cognition things like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, decision-m and abstract thinking. While for an individual contributor, this is an example of a T-shaped deep specialist that provides human oversight of workflows, has extensive subject matter expertise. So they will have deep knowledge in a specific domain, a layer of AI abilities as well as higher cognition. So basically there is this expectation that AI is going to be deeply embedded into the workflows of both the manager and the individual contributor. I don't have too much more commentary about this. I just thought it was a very interesting exercise coming up with example skill profiles for the future workforce. Let me know in the comments if you agree with this or not. Anyways, so at this point you might be like, "Okay, Tina, wonderful. Great. Okay, got it. These are the skills that I need to learn. " Fine. But how am I supposed to learn these skills if I can't find a job? Okay, let's bring it back full circle. Now

Now, remember what I said at the very beginning of this video that I am sure that it's not just doom and gloom right now because I know people in their 20s and 30s who are doing incredibly well for themselves. In fact, I work with many of these people like our marketing contractor in his mid20s. Our business growth lead early 20s. Our events coordinator also mid20s and our newest full-time hire software engineer in her early 20s. We also have quite a lot of freelancers too who we work with. I also know of many other people who are just career freelancing uh started off freelancing covered full-time building their own agencies and building their own companies themselves too. So, what actually sets these people apart versus the majority of people who are interviewing and not having any luck? The answer to this is initiative. Okay, bye. You can go now. Just kidding. I will explain. This is no longer the traditional world where companies are willing to invest in new graduates and people who don't have skills yet and develop the skills for them. No, it is a world in which you as the individual need to take control of your own career with your own hands, aka take initiative. I'm sorry if this is not the answer that you wanted to hear, but alas, it is the truth. Even the people that we ultimately hired, they were people with extremely high initiative. They were the people that learned skills that were not taught in school because they realized that these are the skills that they need. You know, they me through the team, through like a bunch of people in our team to try to like talk with us, code emails, messages, referrals from a bunch of different people and working on their own things, working on smaller companies, which they would then use those skills to leverage into a different position. In my opinion, the highest return on investment way of taking initiative is by doing freelancing. You're not going to be just like working on your personal projects that are not really relevant to other people. You're going to make sure you're working on real projects for people and learning the skills along the way. It's also a lot easier to get a freelancing position than it is to try to go get a full-time job these days. I'm not going to go into more detail now about how to actually land a freelancing job, how to like do a freelancing job, etc., etc. We literally did an entire workshop on this, which was like 2 hours long. I also do have a video over here where I talk about how to start freelancing where you can check it out if you want to get started. Basically, what you just have to realize is that unfortunately, nobody is going to come and just give you a job these days and just like applying with everybody else is not going to be it. Like you need to be taking initiative to make yourself hireable and also make the initiative to get a job outside of those traditional recruiting methods where you're just like putting your resume in or something. Oh, I also do have like a lot of videos on self-arning actually, but here is one over here. Also link in the description. Some of the skills that you definitely should be learning these days. All right, so before I end this video, finally, I do want to address those of you who are literally just starting out and trying to pick a major for your college uh or you're thinking about completely changing your career. Here are some graphics that showcase the largest growing and declining jobs by 2030, as well as the fastest growing and declining jobs by 2030 as predicted by the WF. I did cross-check this with a few other resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they do more or less have similar vibes. specialized technological stuff, environmental stuff, security stuff, and the trades. If you want, I could actually make an entire video about the best upcoming jobs going into 2026. So, let me know in the comments if you would like me to do that. I would be happy to do that. Thank you so much for watching until the end of this video. Please let me know in the comments what is your current job situation right now and what are your plans. And I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.