'Great Resignation' Enters Third Year (reuters.com) 50
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The proportion of workers who expect to switch employers in the next 12 months is higher than that from the "Great Resignation" period of 2022, a PwC survey of the global workforce found. Around 28% of more than 56,000 workers surveyed by PwC said they were "very or extremely likely" to move from their current companies, compared to 19% in 2022, and 26% in 2023. PwC's 2024 "Hopes and Fears" survey also showed workers are embracing emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and prioritizing upskilling amid rising workloads and heightened workplace uncertainty.
Pete Brown, global workforce leader at PwC UK, said employees are placing an "increased premium" on organizations that invest in their skills growth, and so, businesses must prioritize upskilling and employee experience. About 45% of the workers surveyed said they have experienced rising workloads and an accelerating pace of workplace change in the last 12 months, with 62% saying they have seen more change at work in the past year than the previous 12 months. Among employees who use GenAI daily, 82% said they expect it to increase their efficiency in the next 12 months. Reflecting confidence that GenAI opportunities would support their career growth, nearly half of those surveyed by PwC expected GenAI to generate higher salaries, with almost two-thirds hoping these emerging tools will improve the quality of their work. Carol Stubbings, global markets and tax and legal services leader at PwC UK, said: "The findings suggest that job satisfaction is no longer enough." In order to retain talent and mitigate pressures, Stubbings said employers must invest in staff and tech platforms.
Pete Brown, global workforce leader at PwC UK, said employees are placing an "increased premium" on organizations that invest in their skills growth, and so, businesses must prioritize upskilling and employee experience. About 45% of the workers surveyed said they have experienced rising workloads and an accelerating pace of workplace change in the last 12 months, with 62% saying they have seen more change at work in the past year than the previous 12 months. Among employees who use GenAI daily, 82% said they expect it to increase their efficiency in the next 12 months. Reflecting confidence that GenAI opportunities would support their career growth, nearly half of those surveyed by PwC expected GenAI to generate higher salaries, with almost two-thirds hoping these emerging tools will improve the quality of their work. Carol Stubbings, global markets and tax and legal services leader at PwC UK, said: "The findings suggest that job satisfaction is no longer enough." In order to retain talent and mitigate pressures, Stubbings said employers must invest in staff and tech platforms.
Semantiquibbles, from Chef Boyardee (Score:5, Insightful)
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"i'm a bitter loser and all i know are other bitter losers so my assumption is every other person on earth is a bitter loser"
PwC gets paid by employers - not credible (Score:2)
Be skeptical of any poll and research about employees done by a company that exists by selling product to employers.
PwC is an accounting an business strategy consulting firm. It's customers are employers and wouldn't release any 'research' to make its paying customers (the employers) angry.
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My $0.02:
The link between the financial sector and a nation's central bank is very close.
The financial sector is for-profit, the central bank is supposed to serve the national interest.
However, more and more, central banks serve the financial sector primarily due to the revolving door between the two and the promise of sinecures post-public service.
Central banks control monetary policy which affects everyone, immediately. And it can reward the financial sector handsomely and quickly as they are positioned c
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If you want to see real grift, look up the fortunes of congress critters before they came to Congress and what happened after they got there. It is so bad that either the NYT or WashPo (I forget which) ran a story that the fund managers on Wall Street were looking at how congress critters invested their money in stocks so that the fund managers could mirror them. Having inside information on what will effect those companies tends to make investing a bit easier.
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I can say confidently that I've worked harder than most people in these comments ever will. Before you argue please tell me that bleeding hands, all nighters, and months without days off were norms for you or don't bother.
Shit sucks worse all the time and honestly the juice isn't worth the squeeze for these kids. They should just stay at home and do nothing until it all burns down. Based on my experiences as a young man and observations, if I had a kid I'd tell them to stay at home, study, and not intervi
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"bleeding hands, all nighters, and months without days off"
Pro rock climber?
Or are you an undocumented weed harvester in a Chinese-owned grow-op in New Mexico?
Coca farmer in Columbia?
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I was doing military work. Worked for literally 4 days once. Stay up for 4 days some time and tell me how it feels. This wasn't staying awake, this was doing work and standing watch.
Gave me a lot of interesting ideas about power and exploitation and how people would treat each other given the chance.
It would be nice if I could say that these tough times were important to the mission or the world but more often than not they were the result of weak leadership, poor upward communication, or simply for the
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Methinks nearly everyone who crosses your path hears this story. You sound like fun. Also, people I've met who have that kind of story keeps it on the down low.
Re: Semantiquibbles, from Chef Boyardee (Score:2)
So what if this is his "single issue"? Way to be judgmental.
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I could tell you some sob stories about how I ended up in that situation in the first place. Society has a pipeline for trash and I'm like the small fraction of people who managed to climb out and make people aware of it. Sure you can go ask some old man why he works at the recycling center but his very place in life casts doubt on any claim that he might belong anywhere but there.
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Actually that is good to know. I also have some traits that might have led to me becoming "trash" if my upbringing had been different, or if I hadn't had intelligence to spare. But I'm not sure the details are as important as the recognition that we are all where we are because of luck, and the less fortunate do not deserve less respect or help. Though hearing the stories is probably the only way a fortunate person will realize their successes aren't more laudable than the mediocrity of others.
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Lmao it's not like the story was about killing people or losing friends. It's core to my personality and it's a rare experience that reveals much about human nature. I tell this story to pretty much any old fuck that puffs out their chest and tells me that life will teach me a lesson or I need to learn the value of work and then I tell them to tell me about their tales of strife and overcoming hardships and they usually don't have much to say.
Ever talk to someone who did time in prison? They talk about i
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I'll quibble your quibble. They're resigning, not retiring.
Remote work (Score:5, Insightful)
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The boundary between a contracting (gig) and "permanent" may be blurring, or at least may need blurring, especially in IT, which changes like the wind. Rather than a solid distinction between contractor and employee, perhaps the longer a contractor spends with an org, the more employee-like benefits they automatically accrue.
Single-payer health insurance would help, as it would all go into or come out of the same pot, making gig hopping easier. But GOP fights that. Ability to change jobs is more important f
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I think this is a particularly astute observation, especially given that employees don't choose their medical insurance, their employers do. There are a zillion reasons we don't capture much of the benefits of a free market in medicine, and at this point, I think it's an uphill battle to allege that a single-payer system would have more deadweight loss than where we are now.
Job hopping is incredibly important for
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It stands to reason that employment fluidity increases with work-from-home, and that horse is out of the barn. As long you can get a new job without leaving your bedroom and not worry about moving expenses, and they can fire you just by sending an email, I can't imagine why we would expect a return to old norms.
So there IS HOPE yet for that sub-culture of basement-dwelling, game-playing, one-flap jammie-wearing folks that live at their parent's house well past the age of 18--20?
Whodathunkit?
Just keep that sub-culture away from any job that has access to a hammer. Hint - See another /. story for more details on that reference.
Remote work (Score:1)
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Re:Remote work (Score:4, Insightful)
I keep seeing this argument that the majority of folks weren't getting their work done during WFH. My question is, are those same folks getting their work done while working in an office, or are they the types that spend their entire day out in the smoking area, or the cafeteria, at the water cooler, or going desk to desk bothering people who are trying to work, and "networking"?
I understand that some people, by their nature, are more productive in an office than they would be working from home, but I think the majority of people who were shirking their work during WFH were/are shirking their work in the office too. Those people are deadwood and should be fired, (which, granted, is no easy task when it comes to government workers.)
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Again, this is just at my place of employment.
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I can tell you the opposite. Being WFH allows people to respond at 2am if needed.
Just like some people may be better suited to in office or WFH type situations, companies themselves are not immune from being good at it or terrible at it.
Good managers don't need butts in office seats for productivity. But that means the managers now have to have actual useful and informative metrics of work produced. Far too many don't. As the saying goes, there's no free lunch and WFH isn't any different. If your mana
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What exactly does the work entail?
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What exactly does the work entail?
They (the slowest ones) take new images of properties as well as any legal information about said properties and load them into our database. They get the images from other employees that take the pictures and they get the legal documents from the county government tax office website.
Hell, if that was my job I'm not sure how motivated I would be either.
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During the work from home days, there were some folks who handled it well and got their work done. The majority of workers did not.
In my part of the world, during 3 years of pandemic and remote work, almost everything worked just fine.
So either it was only the "majority of workers" in your vicinity that cannot get work done, or else the majority of workers actually did nothing useful even when working in the office.
That was the same question I pose to managers who keep insisting RTO is somehow "better" -- what KPI did the team failed in years of remote working, except warming seats in the office? No? Then RTO isn't better by any meas
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If they want to pay you to sit in a cube and stare at the ceiling for 8 hours a day, accept that you are a seat-warmer and take their money. That is your level of accomplishment. It is who you are.
If you have valuable skills, become a contractor and sell the results of your work on your own terms. It is a good life.
Most people are not talented. Most people are seat-warmers.
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IFO get a shit-ton more work done at home than I do in the office. As long as there aren't too many Zoom meetings peppered throughout the day, the peace and quiet of my house is good for concentration. At the office the sales team are constantly talking in between cold-calls, because talking nonstop is what they do best, hence sales. The middle managers take advantage of the fact that we're in the office to schedule meetings all day, so office days are officially non-progress days.
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Even with Teams meetings, as soon as you notice that it's yet again one of these "the important narcissist wants to drone on about how awesome he is" meetings, you can take the headphones off, put the drone into the background and continue working.
It's kinda hard to do that in an office where the narcissist notices and gets miffed over it.
Weird stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind of word salad-ish, And employee experience is particularly nebulous. Some might want free onsite daycare and menstrual leave, some might want hookers and blackjack. Some might not want upskilling, and wish to have the same job until they retire as their employee experience. People are not a monolithic group.
"About 45% of the workers surveyed said they have experienced rising workloads and an accelerating pace of workplace change in the last 12 months,
Got it, don't give employees work, less work is better, and just coming in and bullshitting all day is the best situation. This ties back to the idea of All employees being the same.
Carol Stubbings, global markets and tax and legal services leader at PwC UK, said: "The findings suggest that job satisfaction is no longer enough." In order to retain talent and mitigate pressures, Stubbings said employers must invest in staff and tech platforms.
That doesn't even make sense.
Now for a dose of reality. This so called "Great Resignation" is just job hopping, which is the best way to get your salary bumped up while first in the workforce. When I entered the workforce, I tripled my salary over the course of 4 years. So good on the people who are job hopping.
Ya gotta be pretty good though. And there is the problem for a lot of people. If you have a bad tude, or if your idea of work is to have less work, you might find job hopping a little less gooder.
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Agree 100% with your assessment of the situation.
I did the same in my early career, and was good enough to warrant it. After climbing to the level of my capability I found a spot to settle that is comfortable, and I don't need to job hop anymore.
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Agree 100% with your assessment of the situation.
I did the same in my early career, and was good enough to warrant it. After climbing to the level of my capability I found a spot to settle that is comfortable, and I don't need to job hop anymore.
Yup, start your grind, then after you get a job you want to keep and make it work. Then start socking the money away.
In my case, I was looking for an academic environment, so when I got it, I was set.
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I am surprised that this common sense posting has not been down-modded into oblivion yet.
I agree with what Al is saying here.
Seriously, if companies want to keep employees they have to develop ways to 'upskill' their workers. Some companies provide tuition aid. Others provide company-sponsored courses. I once worked for a BIG CORP that did both. Most management 'grade' employees stayed on 20-25-30-35 years. The Union 'grade' employees tended to stay because they had good contracts that their Unions fought f
Tech sucks now, so competition increases (Score:5, Interesting)
Welp...now that borrowing money isn't free...these "fraternities" are becoming more and more like a regular job every day. People with stupid jobs are getting laid off...some people with useful ones are getting cut too. The core mission is pure bullshit....let's throw AI on everything and hope somehow it will turn into a product...with no working demos and no obvious plan to success other than selling AI tools and hoping someone else will figure out a way to make a useful product with your garbage generative AI copycat efforts. It's a clear scam, whereas 10 years ago, they were building useful products that made life better.
So how much sacrifice will you endure to stay employed in Big Tech? The pay is still good. Most of the good perks are still there, even if they're being threatened every other earnings call. However, many people are just done with it. It lost its luster. You can commute to the busiest tech spot in the valley...probably at least an hour...which is great in your 20s and even early 30s, but eventually folks grow up and want to have kids and a job with 1/4 of the commute and half the pay and 2/3 the hours gets to be far more appealing. People change jobs for all sorts of reasons, they just held off recently. What was anomalous was how appealing big tech was for the last 20 years. Many wanted to leave, but the job was too nice, the culture was too exciting, the mission was genuinely cool. Why work at an insurance company or bank when Google was making pioneering products, like Android devices, Google Networking, Google Fiber, various moonshots...but now Google is slowly becoming a real job and presumably the same can be said for MS, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter etc.
So now, everyone else has a much better shot at the coveted talent big tech was hoarding...honestly, it's not a bad thing...the job field is getting more competitive, especially for all the formerly second-tier and below employers. Before, the big players offered idealism, a glorious mission, and great pay/perks...remove the idealism and glorious mission and now they're competing with every other job a candidate is qualified for.
Re:Tech sucks now, so competition increases (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 80s and 90s, back when stuff was growing at a fast rate, it was assumed one would work a ton of hours, in return for stock options, which when the company IPO-ed, would make someone extremely rich. Then, those went away, but pay was still quite good compared to other fields one could go in.
As the previous poster stated, now that interest rates are high and money is expensive, the tech sector really doesn't offer anything over other places, except heavy layoffs and complete uncertainty. Nobody wants to do cool new projects anymore, and just try to find ways to add more fees onto existing items, or squeeze people harder.
Will it change? A lot of people will not be finding work until interest rates drop, and new stuff is made. AI doesn't really require many new seats to fill, and we are seeing the role of a full-stack developer which used to be the big money-maker replaced by someone in an offshore firm using ChatGPT as a glorified Stack Overflow to copy and paste code, check if it works, then commit it in the Git repository.
The tech economy is pretty much dead until the next bubble comes around. AI isn't it -- that ship has sailed, and all we are seeing is people trying to get investors in before things burst. We have not had a real "bubble" in a while anyway. Companies sailed on cheap money for a number of years and now that gravy train is gone, there isn't really going to be much new coming out for a while. Especially near-term with the uncertainties of the US political arena.
Who says "I want to be upskilled"? (Score:2)
"I'm going to leave for another job because I want to be upskilled."
Nobody says that, except corporate marketing departments.
I suppose that word means something like "training." What kind of people leave their job because they want to be trained? Yeah there are some, like apprentices and interns. But for most of us, it's on-the-job training. And there's generally no notion that this OJT is somehow a "higher level" of training than what you already got at your current company, but more that you're learning
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No, I don't expect an employer to be enthusiastic about paying for training. That's why they involve their marketing department and come up with a stupid term like "upskill." They offer some kind of online course selection like Pluralsight or some knockoff, and then advertise that they offer "upskilling."
Your post pretty much agrees with my original point.
45% experience rising workloads, accelerating pace (Score:2)
So 55% don't experience rising workloads and an accelerating pace? Where are these mythical workplaces, that aren't always pushing for "faster, faster, faster"!
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It's not that it increased, it was always that way. We keep losing people, and the work keeps needing to get done faster. If we spent time thinking about how we could get work done faster, we'd have to stop getting work done for a while to do that.
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we'd have to stop getting work done for a while to do that
Some of us can't help ourselves on that score. I *hate* doing manual, repetitive work. So if you give me that kind of a job, I'm going to find a way to automate or streamline it. It might slow me down for a bit, but I'll eat that time, even if it has to be my own time, so that I can save a little time 10x a day or whatever. That in turn buys me more margin to do more thinking about how things get done. It's a virtuous cycle.
Mind you, I don't always tell my boss about this time savings, because then he might
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They are pushing, don't worry. I just ignore them.
A fools errand (Score:3)
Using AI to make part of your work is a fools errand. It will simply speed up your replacement with AI. Why keep you if AI can do it?
Of course, that replacement will happen either way but helping training the AI so that it goes faster is a stupid solution. Sure, you will look more productive and more valuable for a while, but it wont last. You actively will make it last less time by using AI.
The upcoming problem is what we do when 80% doesn't need to work. I don't thing the likes of Musk and other plutocrats will share their wealth. Hard times is ahead. By the way, that might only be a problem for your in America - here in Europe I don't think we will live long enough to see it. Russia will fuck things up here so we will return to pre-industrial life or if they win pre-industrial life combine with life indenture.
GenAI (Score:2)