The young humanities graduate. Destined to live in Cognitive Dissonance for the rest of their lives
Eve Moore: Why it’s tougher than ever for young people to get work, despite a ‘booming’ job market
Despite what our parents’ generation may say, taking the first steps into a so-called “booming” job market these days is in many ways harder than ever. Particularly for those like myself, a proud humanities graduate who dares to step outside of a conventional repertoire of degree subjects and career paths. Adding to this difficulty is the continuous lack of personal feedback provided by recruiters.
Despite undeniable advances in contemporary professional opportunities, competition has grown fierce. Congruently, job expectations for supposedly “entry-level” roles have rocketed. There is a sort of comical oxymoronic value in graduate job offerings seeking “XZY… years of experience and ABCDEF… skills”.
But it’s not just hard for humanities graduates:
My experience is far from an isolated case. I’ve heard from classmates who, even fulfilling such sought-after additional assets and equipped with high academic accreditations, are struggling to find suitable opportunities in the current professional market in Ireland.
A dear Paris-based friend of mine – a qualified data analyst at a major music corporation seeking to relocate to Ireland, was recently forewarned by an Irish master’s graduate of economics that it took him eight months to land a job here.
At times, it can seem as if the lengthy, costly and energy-consuming academic qualifications we optimistically undertake are merely an hors d’oeuvre for recruiters’ elevated standards.
At no stage would the obvious hit them. An inexorable supply of cheap labour to suit the Gombeen. They compete with the World, while chained to the corpse of overvalued Irish Property.
Dublin jobs must be impacted here, you’d have to imagine.
LinkedIn: Microsoft says 668 more jobs to go
LinkedIn owner Microsoft has announced a fresh round of job cuts, with around 670 roles set to go.
The social network company says the jobs affected are across its engineering, talent and finance teams.
It comes after LinkedIn axed 716 jobs in May and follows cuts at other big tech firms.
“Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the firm wrote in a post on the LinkedIn website.
The latest job cuts represent about 3% of the company’s workforce of 20,000 staff.
LinkedIn makes its money through job ad listings and premium subscriptions and is used by recruiters around the world.
It has about 950 million users.
A slowdown in hiring along with a fall in advertising spending has hit the company, although it continues to sign up new members.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, the firm’s revenue increased by 5% year-on-year, down from 10% in the previous quarter.
Since late 2022 there have been tens of thousands of layoffs in the technology sector by companies including Amazon, Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Nokia only have ~100 employees in Ireland i think but 14,000 is a big proportion of their workforce. If that sort of reduction is seen across the industry there’ll be a lot more redundancies to come.
