My blog

Tag: Economy

  • Opinion: Job-seekers need to embrace this period of change

    Finito World

     

    It was Ernest Hemingway who said in respect of bankruptcy that it happens ‘bit by bit, then all at once’. Societal change can sometimes seem similar. 2022 has felt like a fast forward button pressed on our lives: everything appears to be occurring helter-skelter, and at breakneck pace.

    The state of play geopolitically has been accelerated by Vladimir Putin’s tragically stupid invasion of Ukraine. This, in turn, has sent the economy spiralling, as inflation has gripped the UK, partly due to the legacy of Covid-19, and partly due to successive administrations’ failure to produce a plausible and independent energy policy.

    The economic turmoil has been exacerbated by an incompetent Bank of England interest rate response, which piled on unnecessary pressure on homeowners. Add in a dicey shift to the Truss administration, and the death of a beloved monarch, and the world looks very different at the finish of 2022 to what it looked like at its start.

    But what period of history is without turbulence? In truth, no age is without its anxieties and shocks, its disasters and its queasiness.

    Besides, political turbulence always has an inner meaning. To take a historical parallel: when Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were tearing apart the Conservative Party over the question of free trade, in a way which might remind us of the 2022 summer battle between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, few could have known that this would lead to the redistributive Asquith pre-war administration, and the beginning of the birth of the welfare state. One order was ceding to another: and that would mean, in time, opportunity for workers previously undreamed of.

    Similarly, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party seeks to pivot – not always convincingly – to the right, and as sizeable swathes of the Conservative Party argue for higher taxes, and not, as used to be Thatcherite orthodoxy, a smaller state, then it can seem as if some new alignment is struggling to be born. It will have its opportunity alongside the uncertainty.

    That’s because turbulent periods always house creativity – and creativity leads to economic activity. The period in the leadup to the Asquith administration saw an enormous amount of invention from air conditioning (1902), to radar (1904), radio broadcasting (1906) and the electronic washing machine (1907). Even World War One engendered numerous inventions we still use today from daylight saving time to Kleenex, zippers and even sanitary pads.

    Ingenuity and perception sharpens in times of crisis. Most economists agree that technology is inherently deflationary insofar as it saves business costs and reduces labour requirements. It was recently noted by chief executive of Ark Investment Management, Cathie Wood that in 2022 companies are rapidly increasing innovation across a range of areas including adaptive robots, autonomous mobility, blockchain, gene editing, and neural networks. And these technologies, once they are introduced and widely adopted, will either lead to jobs, or free up human capital for further invention.

    The world, especially as it is portrayed by today’s media, might be full of vicissitudes, crises and sudden shifts, there are in reality certain constants which don’t get reported.

    The first is human creativity. Consider this array of geniuses in the 20th century: the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charlie Chaplin, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, TS Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Pele, and Nelson Mandela. All were undeterred by the grim news of the day, and of course, another list might be compiled at will – and another and another – until it filled up the whole of this explanation simply with the names of high achievers – without even enlarging on the actual content of their exploits.

    Now consider that they all operated in the same centuries as Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, and numerous genocides and disasters.

    That brings us to the second reason for optimism: opportunity. While opportunity isn’t evenly distributed across society at any one time – an inequality which has led us to create the Finito bursary scheme – its overall quantity is clearly on the increase as education broaden, and as the standard of living rises.

    These considerations ought to buttress job seekers against despair and make us realise that however the economy or the world might look at any one time, the next development is round the corner, and it’s just as likely to be a good one as a bad.

  • The top five groups most affected by the pandemic

    The pandemic has brought untold suffering to people across the globe. Many have lost their lives, or those of friends and family members. To examine the purely economic effects of Covid-19 without addressing that fact would be tasteless at best. However, it is important to measure the lesser effects of the virus in order to determine which groups require more support in terms of work and life.

    The HR tech platform Connectr has drawn up a list of the five groups most affected by the emotional hardship and economic losses which have come with the pandemic. On the economic side, they considered factors such as lost salary, missed employment opportunities, and time wasted. On the emotional side, they considered increased stress, discrimination, and additional time pressures.

    They found that the most affected group has been unrepresented talent, meaning people who have had less access to support networks and technology who may also face discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and socio-economic background. Connectr has found that people from lower socio-economic backgrounds will take 25% longer to develop their careers than others. The problem gets worse when race is considered. For example, the research shows that career development takes an average of 32% longer for black people of lower socio-economic backgrounds.

    The hospitality industry is the second most affected group, as long-term furloughs drained the industry during 2020 and 2021. Facing increasing customer abuse, changing guidelines, and an uncertain future, many of these employees have found new fields of work, leaving a shortage in the hospitality industry.

    University and school students ranked third and fourth, respectively, as learning in both groups was severely interrupted by Covid-19. For university students, online classes meant fewer networking opportunities and a lesser depth of learning. Coupled with the fact that many internships and recruitment opportunities were cut, the classes of 2020 and 2021 have been left at a disadvantage. For school students, the face-to-face interaction with peers and teachers disappeared. The soft skills learned through human interaction during this crucial period of development are oftentimes some of the most important things one learns in school, and these were lost during the pandemic. Even worse, students who did not have access to quality internet and necessary technology were often left behind.

    The fifth and final group on the list is new starters, or those who had recently moved into a new role when the pandemic hit. Because learning through action and experience is extremely important for a greenhorn employee’s progression in their chosen field, advancement has been slowed for those who have started their careers from home.

    As we continue to manage and live with the pandemic, it is hoped that these disadvantages can be reversed, and those lucky enough to escape this period without facing physical and severe emotional losses will undoubtably do their best to persevere. But for many, Covid-19 is not over, and the effects will be long-lasting.

    Source: www.connectr.com.

  • China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    Our Woman in China gives us her take on the nuclear arms race in education between China and the rest of the world

    This is going to be quite a year in China. There’s going to be about eight and a half million graduates in China – and that’s a figure which dwarfs any figure you can imagine in the UK. They’ll be graduating into the toughest job market in living memory.

    It’s worth considering the history. Before 1990, China’s was essentially a planned economy and everybody had roles given by the state. Since then, the economy has grown by around ten percent a year. Unemployment has been incredibly low. Now lots of factors are happening at once. With Covid-19, there’s speculation that you have 100 million unemployed people in China right now.

    Concurrently, you have automation which is happening dramatically in China, with every company becoming leaner. So all these graduates are going to be piling in to this very problematic situation. And there is such faith in education in China. In the 1980s and 90s, if you went abroad and studied, let’s say engineering, and you came back to China, it’s quite likely you’re a millionaire at this point, or senior in the government. Why? Because you brought back information that was incredibly valuable and gave you a massive strategic advantage. Because of that, you now have a generation of parents who believe education is a fast track to employment. That’s heart-breaking as the young today are ill-equipped for the modern world in terms of creativethinking and communication skills.

    It’s an incredibly depressing situation. I speak to a lot of students doing undergraduate degrees and they’re looking at the realities of the economy and thinking, ‘Should I go and get a Masters?’ But even that doesn’t guarantee a job now – when for their parents’ generation, it did.

    That means there’s a major problem for Chinese students studying in the UK: they’re not getting their return on investment. In China, these young people are called ‘sea turtles’: even after having studied in a good, solid university in the UK, they’re unable to get jobs. All this will be detrimental to the higher education system in the UK. There are 900,000 graduates from UK universities in China, and there could be a big shift where Chinese students start to wonder whether it’s worth studying abroad if you don’t get a job at the end of it.

    I don’t think the effects will be felt immediately. Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. These wealthy people will have better connections, and so they’ll end up with jobs and power, and will end up running the country and the biggest companies. That’s a powerful example; it might take 20 or 30 years for these trends to be felt.

    Working against all this is the fact that China is going to go global at some point. So if a young person understands the UK, they are going to be a natural person to go and work in that London office at some point. The historical trends are clear. In the 50s and 60s, China was all about manufacturing; suddenly in the 70s and 80s, we had Sony and all these other companies booming around the world. But global China is in the future. This year’s graduates will fall through the cracks because none of this will have kicked in yet.

    As someone who has been here for 15 years, I would say the UK doesn’t understand that China is absolutely zero sum. China doesn’t want its students to go to the UK and spend lots of money. It wants to learn as much as it can from the UK, the US and Australia and then it wants to export its own education. You only need to read the state media to understand the undertones of what they’re really thinking and what they’re really plotting right now. The longerterm goal is that they don’t want to send anyone to the UK. That’s not explicit, but I would guarantee you it’s the case if you speak to the highest levels of government in China. Why would they want to give money to the UK?

    I’ve probably become a bit more patriotic since I’ve been here: if I had to back a team, I’d like to back the UK. The UK education system is filled with people for whom education is a vocation. They believe in the system. They’re autonomous, and opinionated: it’s filled with brilliant people. In China, nobody has any autonomy; it is control-based. I don’t want that system to win. China’s version of history is that there is only one version of history. Our discipline of history is that you have analysis and the past is open to interpretation. It’s not a good thing when education is used as a weapon to control a population or to politicise everything. I would love to see the UK compete, but I fear that a lot of UK universities are very slow, siloed and very complacent. China is moving incredibly quickly.