U.S. college graduates "have historically found jobs more quickly than people with only a high school degree," writes Bloomberg.

"But that advantage is becoming a thing of the past, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland." "Recently, the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers, indicating that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended," Cleveland Fed researchers Alexander Cline and BarıÅY Kaymak said in a blog post published Monday. The study follows the latest monthly employment data released on Nov. 20, which showed the unemployment rate for college-educated workers continued to rise in September amid an ongoing slowdown in white-collar hiring... The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.
There is a caveat. "Young college graduates maintain advantages in job stability and compensation once hired..." the researchers write. "The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes."

Their research includes a graph showing how the "unemployment gap" first increased dramatically after 2010 between college-educated and high school-educated workers, which the researchers attribute to "the prolonged jobless recovery after 2008". But that gap has been closing ever since, with that gap now smaller than at any time since the 1970s.

"Young high school workers are riding the wave of the historically tight postpandemic labor market with well-below-average unemployment compared to that of past high school graduates, while young college workers are experiencing unemployment rates rarely observed among past college cohorts barring during recessions." The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access. If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends. The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes. These details suggest a nuanced shift in employment dynamics, one in which college graduates face greater difficulty finding jobs than previously but maintain advantages compared with high school graduates in job stability and compensation once hired.
Two key quotes:

• "Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers."

• "Developments related to AI, which may be affecting job-finding prospects in some cases, cannot explain the decades-long decline in the college job-finding rate."

Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole.

Researchers from Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City conducted ten studies examining glitches across thousands of participants and real-world parole hearing transcripts. The core finding is that glitches harm interpersonal judgments because they break the illusion of face-to-face contact, triggering what psychologists call "uncanniness" -- a strange, creepy, or eerie feeling typically associated with humanoid robots or CGI characters that look almost but not quite human.

In one experiment, participants watching a telehealth pitch chose to work with a health professional 77% of the time when no glitches occurred, but only 61% when brief freezes were present. The job interview studies found similar patterns, and when researchers examined 472 Kentucky parole hearings conducted over Zoom, they found that inmates were granted parole 60% of the time in glitch-free hearings versus 48% when transcripts indicated technical problems had occurred.

The researchers ruled out simpler explanations like mere disruption or comprehension difficulties. Glitches inserted during natural pauses in speech -- where no information was lost -- still damaged evaluations. And critically, when participants watched presentations where a shared screen froze rather than a human face, glitches had no effect on judgments at all. The uncanniness only emerged when the technology broke the simulation of sitting across from another person.

Apple's Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.

The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an estimated $20,000 per student -- nearly twice what state and local governments budget for community colleges. About 600 students have completed the 10-month course at Michigan State University. Academy officials say 71% of graduates from the past two years found full-time jobs across various industries.

The program provides iPhones, MacBooks and stipends ranging from $800 to $1,500 per month, though one former student said many participants relied on food stamps. Apple contributed $11.6 million to the academy. Michigan taxpayers and the university's regular students covered about $8.6 million -- nearly 30% of total funding. Two graduates said their lack of proficiency in Android hurt their job prospects. Apple's own US tech workforce went from 6% Black before the academy opened to about 3% this year.

Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already "elite" or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs" with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. "I think that's crazy." While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers. Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates -- those considered "cracked engineers" who already have thick resumes building products and doing research -- are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

"There's definitely a very dreary mood on campus," said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. "People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it's very hard for them to actually secure jobs." The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees. [...] Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study. [...]

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need "two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents," which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidovic, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. "We don't need the junior developers anymore," said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. "The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there." [...] Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing. As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the most troubling economic headlines of 2025. Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence.

For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in.

While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet. "The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers."

"It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce."

Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it's hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles' exhausts. It's just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.

Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects. But in reality, that's pretty far from true. [...] Between the high development costs and the fact that FCEVs only sell with strong incentives, the decision was made to cancel the production of hydrogen vans in France and Poland. Stellantis says there will be no job losses at its factories and that R&D staff will be put to work on other projects. "In a context where the Company is mobilizing to respond to demanding CO2 regulations in Europe, Stellantis has decided to discontinue its hydrogen fuel cell technology development program," said Jean-Philippe Imparato, chief operating officer for Enlarged Europe. "The hydrogen market remains a niche segment, with no prospects of mid-term economic sustainability. We must make clear and responsible choices to ensure our competitiveness and meet the expectations of our customers with our electric and hybrid passenger and light commercial vehicles offensive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GameSpot: Perhaps responding to economic uncertainty and narrowing job prospects, young people in the United States are significantly cutting back on spending on video games compared to this time last year. While 18- to 24-year-olds aren't buying as much across a range of different categories, losses are concentrated in games. New data published by market research firm Circana and reported by The Wall Street Journal suggests that young adults spent nearly 25% less on video game products in a four-week span in April than in the same timeframe last year. Other categories also dramatic drops: Accessories (down 18%), technology (down 14%), and furniture (down 12%).

All categories combined, the 18-24 age group spent around 13% less than last year. This decrease is not reflected among older cohorts, whose spending has been mostly stable year-over-year. The WSJ report suggests that the economic context could be driving young adults to pull back; a tighter labor market, increased economic uncertainty, and student-loan payments restarting all may be contributing to an environment hostile to the spending habits of 18- to 24-year-olds in particular.

36% of all Chinese undergraduate entrants -- about 1.6 million people -- selected engineering degrees in 2022 (the latest year for which data are available), up from 32% in 2010, according to data from China's Ministry of Education. In Britain and America, which have far fewer students to start with, the proportion hovers around 5%.

The surge comes as China's government directs universities to focus on strategic industries and technological bottlenecks. Over 600 Chinese universities now offer undergraduate programs in artificial intelligence, a field the Communist Party vows to dominate by 2030. In 2023, officials started telling universities to overhaul their degree programs, and the education ministry announced an "emergency mechanism" to create degrees more quickly to meet "national priorities." Over half of China's young people now complete some form of higher education through 3,000-odd institutions. Youth unemployment reached 14.9% in May, driving students toward technical fields they believe offer better job prospects.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad.

China's open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.

Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.

AI has lately given China's open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

The New York Times reports: California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future A.I.-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest A.I.-empowered university system..." Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT.
And other U.S. campuses including the University of Maryland are also "working to make A.I. tools part of students' everyday experiences," according to the article. It's all part of an OpenAI initiative "to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life."

The Times calls it "a national experiment on millions of students." If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "A.I.-native universities..." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium A.I. services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT...

OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where A.I. is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide A.I. tools and training...

[Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education] said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the A.I. "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Ms. Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their A.I. chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life.

"It would be their gateway to learning — and career life thereafter," Ms. Belsky said.

The New York Times notes that white-collar workers have faced higher unemployment than other groups in the U.S. over the past few years — along with slower wager growth.

Some economists wonder if this trend might be irreversible... and partly attributable to AI: After sitting below 4% for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has topped that threshold since May... "We're seeing a meaningful transition in the way work is done in the white-collar world," said Carl Tannenbaum, the chief economist of Northern Trust. "I tell people a wave is coming...." Thousands of video game workers lost jobs last year and the year before... Unemployment in finance and related industries, while still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, as rising interest rates slowed demand for mortgages and companies sought to become leaner....

Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that the unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30% since bottoming out in September 2022 (to 2.6% from 2%), versus about 18% for all workers (to 4% from 3.4%). An analysis by Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, shows that unemployment has been most elevated among those with bachelor's degrees or some college but no degree, while unemployment has been steady or falling at the very top and bottom of the education ladder — for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma. Hiring rates have slowed more for jobs requiring a college degree than for other jobs, according to ADP Research, which studies the labor market....

And artificial intelligence could reduce that need further by increasing the automation of white-collar jobs. A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an AI coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25% and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggested that adopting AI could reduce the wage premium enjoyed by more experienced coders, since it would erode their productivity advantages over novices... [A]t least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see AI as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an AI assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4% from 2.9%.
"Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own," the article points out (with one economist noting the unemployment rate is still low compared to historical averages).

Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz even suggested the slower wage growth could reflect the discount that these workers accepted in return for being able to work from home.

Thanks to Slashdot reader databasecowgirl for sharing the article.

Several countries are seeing a decline in PhD enrollments as high living costs, stagnant stipends and limited job prospects deter students from pursuing doctoral degrees. Australia recorded an 8% drop in domestic PhD enrollments from 2018 to 2023 despite population growth of 7%, while Japan's numbers fell to 15,014 in 2023 from 18,232 in 2003, data from education authorities showed.

PhD stipends have failed to keep pace with rising costs. In Australia, doctoral students receive about A$32,000 ($20,000) annually, below minimum wage, while Brazil only increased its graduate grants last year after a decade-long freeze.

The trend reflects broader concerns about academic careers becoming increasingly precarious, said Claudia Sarrico, a project lead at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Some countries are taking steps to address the issue. Japan's education ministry plans to provide additional funding for doctoral students, while Brazil's 40% increase in graduate grants in 2023 has led to a slight uptick in enrollments.

Valerie Warner is 71 years old — and owes $268,000 in student loans.

Roughly 40 years ago she went to law school, but was only able to find work as a legal aid and later work in the public school system, which the Washington Post calls "a rewarding job but one that didn't pay enough to wipe out her loans." Later she earned a masters of education degree: All told, Warner borrowed a total of about $60,000 for her two advanced degrees. The amount seemed reasonable given the career trajectory that both credentials promised, but that path never materialized. Working a series of low-wage jobs, she went in and out of forbearance before ultimately defaulting. The balance ballooned to the current $268,000 total over the years due to collection fees and interest capitalization.
And she's not the only one in debt. "On a dreary December afternoon, a group of senior citizens stood in the rain outside the Education Department pleading for relief from a debt that many fear will burden them for the rest of their lives..." Some sat in rocking chairs, cross-stitching their debt number in a pattern. Others held signs that read, "Time is running out, sunset our debt." Or wore T-shirts saying, "Debt relief before we die...."

[A]ctivists are urging the U.S. Education Department to discharge the student debt of older borrowers who they say are in no position to repay. They say the department could use a little-known federal statute that considers a person's ability to pay within a reasonable time and the inability of the government to collect the debt in full. There are 2.8 million federal student loan borrowers aged 62 and older with a total of $121.5 billion in debt, more than 726,300 of them over the age of 71, according to the Education Department. Older borrowers are one of the fastest-growing segments of the government's student loan portfolio, and their Social Security benefits are subject to garnishment...

The Education Department would only acknowledge receiving a memo from the Debt Collective, the group organizing the campaign, outlining the agency's authority to cancel the debt of older borrowers. The activist organization said it has been meeting with members of Congress, White House committees and Education Department officials about the matter since September. "Many of these folks have been borrowers for 20 or 30 years, with punishingly high interest rates. Their balances and the way they have dragged on for decades is just an indictment of the broken system and the failure of past relief efforts," said Eleni Schirmer, an organizer with the Debt Collective... According to the think tank New America, the number of Americans approaching retirement age with student loan debt has skyrocketed over 500 percent in the last two decades. Some have loans they took out to finance their college educations, while others took out federal Parent Plus loans or co-signed private loans for their children.
The article points out that the U.S. government will garnish up to 15 percent of the Social Security income to recoup student loan debt, even if it means leaving recipients below the poverty line.

But it also includes this quote from Adam Minsky, an attorney who specializes in student debt, about the prospects for federal action that survives challenges in the U.S. court system. "[A]s a practical matter, I don't think that judges and courts that have been hostile to mass debt relief would treat this differently from other programs that have been blocked or struck down."

Major U.S. corporations have eliminated thousands of middle management positions over the past two years in a widespread restructuring trend, with no signs of rehiring, according to workforce data from Revelio Labs.

Job postings for middle management roles remained 42% below April 2022 levels in October, even as hiring rebounded for other positions. Meta, Citigroup, UPS, and Amazon have all reduced management layers or increased worker-to-supervisor ratios, citing efficiency goals. Middle managers accounted for 32% of layoffs in 2023, up from 20% in 2019, Live Data Technologies reports.

Displaced supervisors, typically in their late 40s to 50s, face limited job prospects as companies permanently eliminate these positions rather than temporarily freezing hiring, Business Insider reports.

A new lawsuit filed by a current Apple employee accuses the company of spying on its workers via their personal iCloud accounts and non-work devices. From a report: The suit, filed Sunday evening in California state court, alleges Apple employees are required to give up the right to personal privacy, and that the company says it can "engage in physical, video and electronic surveillance of them" even when they are at home and after they stop working for Apple.

Those requirements are part of a long list of Apple employment policies that the suit contends violate California law. The plaintiff in the case, Amar Bhakta, has worked in advertising technology for Apple since 2020. According to the suit, Apple used its privacy policies to harm his employment prospects. For instance, it forbade Bhakta from participating in public speaking about digital advertising and forced him to remove information from his LinkedIn page about his job at Apple.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a "golden ticket" to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Mr. Rendon says he didn't land a single interview.

Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. "They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'" she said. "It was really disconcerting." In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. "I loved what we were doing," he said. "We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour."

Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. "I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years," said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:

• Armando Solar-Lezama, leader of MIT's Computer-Assisted Programming Group, "believes that A.I. tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we'll just make more, better software. We'll use it to solve problems that wouldn't have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket."

• Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, said of the job prospects for coding boot camp graduates" "I think it's pretty grim."

Workers in the U.S. are running in place -- feeling stuck in jobs with dimmed prospects of advancement and seeing fewer opportunities to jump ship for something better. From a report: It's a sharp contrast to the heady days of 2022 -- when employees were quitting their jobs at record high rates, open roles proliferated and the possibility of a higher paycheck always seemed just around the corner.

Employers are sitting tight, says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job site Glassdoor. Companies aren't making big changes to hiring strategy. That means "fewer opportunities for workers to climb the career ladder," he says. They're still plugging away at the same role they've had for years without the opportunity to move up internally or at a new company. 65% of the 3,400 professionals surveyed by Glassdoor last month said they feel stuck in their current role. "As workers feel stuck, pent-up resentment boils under the surface," Zhao writes in a report out yesterday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In 2022, at the height of the "great resignation," a record 4.5 million workers each month -- about 3% of the U.S. workforce -- were quitting their jobs. While some economists have said this pandemic-era trend is over, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn forecasts that even more people plan to leave their jobs in 2024. Nearly half (46%) of professionals say they're considering quitting in the year ahead -- higher than the 40% who said the same ahead of 2021s great resignation, according to new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries between February and March 2024.

In the U.S., LinkedIn has seen a 14% increase in job applications per opening since last fall, with 85% of workers saying they plan to look for a new role in 2024, a survey of 1,013 U.S. professionals conducted between November and December 2023 found. And Americans' confidence in their job-hunting prospects has reached its highest point in two years, a February 2024 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 jobseekers shows. This renewed sense of optimism is aided by the fact that the U.S. economy avoided the recession forecast for 2023, ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak tells CNBC Make It. [...]

It's not just better labor market conditions driving more U.S. workers to consider a career change in 2024. Inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets; nearly half (45%) of workers planning to switch jobs this year say they need a higher income, according to Monster's 2024 Work Watch Report. Job switchers tend to increase their salaries more quickly than those who stay put, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Changing jobs is coming with greater pay gains: New data from ADP shows the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers was 10% in March, up from 2.9% six months prior. With salaries finally keeping up with inflation, Pollak adds, the return on investment of switching jobs feels "much higher" than it did six months ago.

Chinese tech giant Kuaishou is laying off employees in their mid-30s as part of a company-wide restructuring plan dubbed "Limestone," FT reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. The move highlights the pervasive ageism in China's tech sector, where younger workers are favored for their perceived willingness to work long hours and keep up with the latest technological developments, the report adds.

While China's labor law does not explicitly prohibit age discrimination, some have interpreted it as such. However, tech executives have openly expressed their preference for younger employees, with companies like ByteDance and Pinduoduo boasting some of the youngest workforces in the industry. The economic slowdown and regulatory crackdowns have exacerbated the problem, with tens of thousands of jobs cut across the sector in recent months. Those over 35 face significant challenges in finding new employment, as even the civil service and service sector prioritize younger applicants. The situation has left many older tech workers anxious about their future job prospects, the report adds.

Since implementing a remote-first policy in 2021, Yelp says it's experienced a surge in job applications and a more satisfied workforce. Fortune reports: Last year, the total number of job applicants was 43% higher compared to 2021, according to Yelp's 2024 Remote Work Report released earlier this month. The number of applicants for sales roles skyrocketed by 103%, and prospects for its general and administrative (G&A) positions shot up 52% over the same time period. Those increases fall in line with data that shows a tidal wave of applicants clamoring for remote jobs. "It's rewarding to see both the level of interest and the quality of our applicants," Carmen Amara, chief people officer at Yelp, told Fortune. "Remote work has allowed us to attract a number of candidates who previously would not have applied to Yelp due to their location."

Despite arguments that remote work weakens workers' connections and growth opportunities, Yelp says it has found the opposite to be true. About 90% of the company's more than 4,700 employees say they have found effective ways to collaborate remotely, and 91% say they are confident in upward career mobility while working out of the office. Flexible schedules have also facilitated a healthy work-life balance -- about 89% of the company's workers say they can manage personal and professional demands, and the same amount say that the remote model has allowed them to make positive changes for their wellbeing.

Notably, Yelp's global tenure has increased to 3.5 years in 2023, compared to 2.8 years the year prior. The company says it's using the money it saved from shutting down its underutilized offices in New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C., to funnel back into employee benefits, professional development, and wellness reimbursements.