The employee market is still in good shape. But it's all good..

Is this important for the job market? Yes, although it is not visible yet. A company that delays investments such as improving energy efficiency or measuring and reducing emissions risks not only increasing its electricity and heat bills, but also deepening difficulties in financing its operations and investments with loans. Western contractors also consider the carbon footprint of their products, and tend to choose suppliers or collaborators who will ensure a lower standard. There are more and more consumers for whom environmental and climate issues are so important that they become one of the criteria for purchasing choices. Therefore, neglecting environmental issues becomes a simple path towards the gradual collapse of the company, which is also reflected in subsequent waves of workforce reductions.

New technologies are flexing their muscles

In industry, up to 62 percent of managers recognize that automation and robotics are key investment priorities for the coming year. A slightly smaller group recognizes that technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, or virtual/augmented reality are creating new opportunities in employment. It can be assumed that the idea is to employ specialists skilled in working with these technologies, but also to reduce the jobs (or vacancies) that machines will be able to effectively replace.

Digital automation had a particularly painful impact on the technology industry this year: around 240,000 people were forced to leave their jobs worldwide. workers in this industry. While increasingly sophisticated digital technologies are naturally leaving their mark on the IT market, in the coming months they will enter new industries and emerge in new roles. An example here is the streaming service Spotify, which boasted of entrusting its AI with tailoring users' profiles to suit their tastes and needs, and around the same time fired about 1.5 thousand people. Employees – 17 percent of the company’s employees. Skeptics respond with colorful formula: AI will not replace employees, but rather employees who can use AI will replace those who cannot.

In purely theoretical terms, employers are becoming increasingly willing to experiment with robotics or artificial intelligence at different levels of their organization structures. They are undoubtedly, to a large extent, exploratory attempts before the possibility of transferring some of the duties performed by humans today to technology. In fact, reports from companies like Randstad show that a whopping 90% – most employers around the world have fairly specific intentions to reduce employment. This trend may also include the phenomenon of soft cutting, that is, “quietly” reducing work teams, by liquidating organizational units in the company or transferring employees to lower-paying jobs – in the hope that they will search for a new job themselves.

But on the other hand, experts also assure us that although we often encounter bots asking us how they can help, in a field that needs human intuition (and the ability to understand what is happening to a customer who cannot explain his point). ), Artificial Intelligence will not replace humans. Therefore, it is difficult to believe that customer service centers will see any catastrophic reduction. Specialists also point out that it will be difficult to replace people in professions related, among others: with the construction industry, logistics – especially driving and healthcare.

Pros and cons of hybrid working

The pandemic has severely broken the stereotype that – as the popular saying goes – your eyes make the horse fat. Suddenly it became clear that a large number of corporate workers are able to perform their duties from home or from anywhere outside the office. Businessmen, who had been largely discontented, have finally come to terms with this. The “return to offices” announced at the end of the Covid-19 expansion turned out to be only partial. According to the Gallup Research Center, while in 2019 60 percent of people who could do their work remotely worked at the company's headquarters, in 2023 there were only 20 percent of these people.