How you can avoid AI stealing your job – by getting a job working in AI!

For decades, a good degree from a respected university was the ticket to a graduate job and a decent salary. 

Employers would vie for the brightest and best, and graduates would find that – although expensive – their degrees would ultimately pay off because they could command higher wages. 

But not any more, it seems. Hundreds of thousands of graduates are leaving university and entering the most difficult jobs market in years – and with an even gloomier outlook on the horizon.

Scores are applying for every job, trainee schemes and apprenticeships are drying up, and some graduates are making hundreds of applications without a single success.

James Reed, chief executive of recruiter Reed, said this month that the number of graduate job adverts on its site has plummeted from 180,000 three or four years ago to just 55,000 today. So worrying is the outlook that he suggested families should encourage their children to look into manual jobs instead.

Behind this bleak jobs market is a toxic storm of factors. Anaemic growth in the economy is one. Employers are hesitant to take on new staff while they’re not sure what’s ahead.

Labour’s increase in the National Insurance paid by employers and to the minimum wage has also hit the jobs market as both measures raise the cost of taking on new employees.

The number of vacancies in the UK fell by another 10,000 between June and August to 728,000 – the 38th consecutive quarterly drop.

But perhaps most insidious is the growth of AI in the workplace, which is seeing many of the roles typically performed by graduates taken over by this new technology.

Until very recently, tasks such as writing reports, researching and admin would be assigned to workers on the first rung of the career ladder. 

Now so-called machine learning Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, can perform these tasks – and are often cheaper and faster than the graduates they are replacing. 

Users of these tools can simply type in commands such as ‘write me a presentation based on the following data and spreadsheets’ or ‘read these five reports and write a 1,000-word precis’ and the tasks are complete within minutes or even seconds.

However, in this dark landscape there is a ray of light.

While nine million jobs could be lost globally due to AI in the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum, the same report also predicts that 11 million jobs could be created by AI.

Unlike previous jobs in new technology, they will not typically require specialist knowledge or computer science training.

In fact, the skills required are those learned by graduates from both arts and science degrees.

Many graduates are fighting back against AI stealing jobs, by getting a job in AI themselves. Jake Blaisdell, 25, is one of them. He co-founded an AI start-up with no formal training in computer science, having studied international business at the University of Edinburgh.

He says almost anyone can now develop an app to show prospective investors who might be able to kickstart a business.

Previously you would have needed to employ an app designer or a coder. Now you can get your app to do whatever you wish by inputting prompts in simple English into an AI tool such as Amazon Bedrock, Claude or ChatGPT.

For example, if you wanted your app to set an alarm at 9am, instead of inputting lines of code, you could write a prompt into the AI tool saying, ‘write a line of code to make an alarm go off at 9am every day’ and it would handle it. This means anyone could build an app or website without specialist help.

Jake and his co-founder Conrad Kissling spent six weeks using AI tools to design the functionality of their phone app, Remy. He says that was enough to create an early version to show potential investors – and they managed to raise £345,000 last year as a result.

The app, Remy, is designed to help families cut down food waste by cataloguing what is in their fridges and cupboards, then alerting them when it is about to go off and suggesting recipes to cook it.

It’s claimed it can save a family of four £2,000 a year in food waste.

Users take a picture of the contents of their fridge and cupboards and upload them…