The picture does look extremely bleak for young people trying to achieve what their parents or grandparents did, owning a secure home to raise their own family.

As well as impacting on day to-day living, high housing costs also increase the benefit bill. Increasingly, people’s earnings do not cover all living costs and so they need government assistance funded by the taxpayer. The proportion of those claiming housing benefit who are in employment has doubled from 11% in November 2008 to 22.5% in February 2014. The total housing benefit bill in England — accounting for inflation — has risen by almost 150% from £8.7bn to £21.5bn in 21 years.

This housing problem does not look likely to go away anytime soon with current lack of action from the government. The people who own houses will want to see them carry on rising. The PWC report says that 35% of homes will be owned outright, without a mortgage, by 2025. In 1995, just 24% of homes were owned outright.

FT: Foreigners buy nearly 75% of new homes in inner London — Foreigners bought almost three-quarters of the new homes sold in inner London last year.

More than half of all residences worth more than £1m are sold to foreign buyers. Some of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods go dark at the end of the social season, when wealthy residents return to their primary residences in Delhi, Moscow or Shanghai.

There are obvious solutions but neither government that has been in power recently seem to want to reduce this trend or try to even halt it, it’s not surprising when 25 percent of MPs are landlords compared to just 2 percent of the population. Recently, the Financial Times revealed that landlords increased their wealth by £434 billion in the last decade.

Employment Possibilities For Young People

Emerging employment models and technological change is set to disrupt work for many people in the future. Young workers who are generally low skilled, less experienced and less educated will be less able to adapt to a changing labour market and could end up struggling and suffering the most.

Changing Models of Employment

The future of work: Jobs and skills in 2030 from the UK Commission on Employment and Skills (UKCES) predicts the the way we work will be vastly within 15 years. This is what the UK’s future of work could look like in alternative scenarios;

1. Forced Flexibility — Greater business flexibility and incremental innovation lead to modest growth in the economy, but this flexibility often results in fewer opportunities and weakened job security for the low-skilled. “Employees will find themselves in an hourglass-shaped labour market. For highly skilled individuals, a progressive work environment allows for greater autonomy and a better balancing of work and family life. While the “squeezed middle” of the workforce sees jobs disappearing, low-skilled workers compete ferociously for positions (across all sectors).”

2. The Great Divide — Despite robust growth driven by strong high-tech industries, a two-tiered, divided society has emerged, reinforcing the divergence in the economic positions of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’ “Employees experience new job opportunities due to the growth of companies providing high-tech goods. New jobs are also created in the higher value business and professional service industries that are linked to these new technologies. Positions for highly skilled workers come with a high degree of autonomy. Among the medium and low-skilled there is intense competition for poorly paid temporary positions, with limited career prospects, and a continued drop in demand for medium and low-skilled workers in manufacturing.”

3. Skills Activism — Technological innovation drives the automation of white-collar work and brings large-scale job losses and political pressure, leading to an extensive government-led skills programme. “Employees face long periods of unemployment, in particular those professionals made redundant by IT automation. Work is mainly project-based, with a high turnover of jobs, which can make the development of new skills more challenging.”

4. Innovation Adaptation — In a stagnant economy, improved productivity is achieved through rigorous implementation of ICT solutions. “Employees face relative insecurity of employment, many being forced to develop ongoing portfolios of project-based assignments with a variety of employers. Company-specific qualifications are often demanded as an entry ticket to jobs.”

The government study predicts that many changes could occur to employment within a short timeframe and low skilled workers may find these changes most challenging to transit to. It also found precarious employment with less employee benefits such as zero hour contracts could increase.

Forty percent of zero-hours workers earn less than £111 a week, the qualifying threshold for statutory sick pay, compared with 8.5% of permanent employees. The Office for National Statistics said the number of people reporting that they work on contracts without a minimum number of hours climbed to 744,000 from 624,000 in 2014, a rise of 19% to 2.4% of the total UK workforce of 31 million.

The ONS also found that 40% of those on such contracts wanted to work more hours than they were offered. A study published by the TUC in December showed that average weekly earnings for zero-hours workers were £188, compared with £479 for permanent workers. Of those working on zero-hours contracts 34% were aged 16 to 24.

A study by Deloitte found Canadian organizations are reaching out to the “open talent economy.” 47% of Canadian respondents plan to increase their use of contingent, outsourced, contract or part-time workers in the next three to five years. 80% view workforce capability as an important trend — and 53% see it as a long-term priority for their organization.”

“Traditional employment will no longer be the norm. replaced by contingent workers such as freelancers and part-time workers. The long-term trend of hiring contingent workers will continue to accelerate with more than 80% percent of large corporations planning to substantially increase their use of a flexible workforce.”

Jobs and skills in 2030:What trends shape the future of work? — As businesses shrink their workforces to a minimum using flexibly employed external service providers to cover shortfalls, a much smaller group of employees will be able to enjoy long-term contracts. “The idea of a single education, followed by a single career, finishing with a single pension is over”

Of the UK workforce, 14.7 per cent is now self-employed — the highest percentage since records began. The self-employed sector has grown to around 4.5 million, a 14.2 per cent increase compared with a 4.3 per cent increase in the number of employees. Anyone doing 1 hour or more a week of paid work is counted in the employment figures. Zero hour contracts can count, so someone who only works 5 hours a week can count as employed.

The employment rate is the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work. Right now there are not enough jobs for each person who wants to work. In early 2015 in the UK, about 1.3 million people were in part-time jobs when they wanted full-time work yet in 2015 there were only 743,000 job vacancies across the UK, there isn’t currently enough full jobs for the underemployed to get, nevermind the millions more classed as economically inactive or unemployed.

Almost a million young people are idle. In June 2015 there were 922,000 young people (aged from 16 to 24) in the UK who were Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET).

The percentage of all young people in the UK who were NEET was 12.7%, down 0.3 percentage points from January to March 2015 and down 0.5 percentage points from a year earlier.

Just under half (47%) of all young people in the UK who were NEET were looking for work and available for work and therefore classified as unemployed. The remainder were either not looking for work and/or not available for work and therefore classified as economically inactive.

Another worrying trend for young people is the increase in underpaid internships to get onto the skills ladder and gain experience.

BBC: The new forever interns — “ The most recent 2014 unemployment rates for under-25s in Europe and the US shows a whopping 54% unemployment rate for those under 25 in Spain, 43% in Italy, nearly 24% in France, 18% in the UK and 12% in the US. As youth unemployment increased an entire generation saw internships replace a first job. Lack of job security for young people has become a society-wide problem. Even in a country like France the number of internships shot up from 600,000 in 2006 to 1.6 million in 2012. “It’s become a way for young people to gain job experience, and it shouldn’t be,record rates of youth unemployment have been directly correlated with the rise of unpaid internships, which replace jobs and drive inequality, not only does the practice allow companies to get graduates’ skills on the cheap, it gives those who can afford to work for free an unfair advantage over their less well-off peers.” Perlin said in an email. What is even more worrying for young workers is that this job experience is often pro bono: a 2013 EU report found that 59% of 18- to 35-year-olds across 27 EU member states hadn’t received any financial compensation for their most recent internship.

Four in ten interns still aren’t receiving the minimum wage, according to research released today by Monster.co.uk, which questioned over 200 young people in the UK who have completed an internship in the past 12 months. When questioning employers, the Monster study found that more than a fifth (22 per cent) of those who employ interns admit to paying them less than the minimum wage, despite the fact that the majority (84 per cent) claim to understand the law regarding this issue.

Young people from poorer families can be excluded from the opportunity to intern due to lack of financial assistance. According to a YouGov 2014 poll, interns in the UK don’t fare much better. Some 26% of UK companies pay either nothing or only expenses for interns, typically about £500 ($744). “It can cost up to £1,000 ($1,488) per month to do an unpaid internship in London,” said Ben Lyons, co-director of Intern Aware.

The number of NEETS, unpaid internships and zero hour contracts may increase in the future. Many employment benefits such as pensions that older generations enjoyed look to be eroded for this new generation of workers, that is if they can even find a job.

Young people who are low skilled, low experienced and low educated will find it harder to find work in the future as I believe, as well as many studies and experts predict that technological changes in the next 20 years will disrupt low skilled workers the most.

Technological Disruption

A 2014 Pew Report Some 1,896 experts responded to the following question: Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?

It found these reasons to be concerned about it this time;

Impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly blue-collar employment; the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work as well. Certain highly-skilled workers will succeed wildly in this new environment — but far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs at best, or permanent unemployment at worst. Our educational system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future, and our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices.

Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers — with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order. The fact they only asked within the next 10 years and almost 50% of experts are concerned is pretty alarming.

Other studies have looked into how advancing technology could affect jobs and found startling results, a study by Gartner predicts one in three US jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025. “Cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts. Knowledge work will be automated, new digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can.” says Gartner.

Deloitte, the Big Four accountancy firm, and the University of Oxford found that 35% of existing UK jobs at high risk of replacement in next twenty years, and that lower-paid jobs over five times more likely to be replaced than higher-paid. Digital, management and creative skills may become more important to employers in the near future, rather than things like repetitive processing, clerical services, and support services, the study found.

The report shows that office and administrative support, sales and services, and transportation are among the key sectors where jobs could be put at risk in the next 20 years or so. Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte, said: “Unless these changes coming in the next two decades are fully understood and anticipated by businesses, policy makers and educators, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment. A widening gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is also a risk as lower skill jobs continue to disappear.”

An analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia warns more than five million jobs, almost 40% of jobs, could disappear in the next 10 to 15 years because of technological advancements, it found that technology is set to wipe out 60 per cent of rural jobs.

Another report in Australia found around 70% of young Australians are getting their first job in roles that will either look very different or be completely lost in the next 10 to 15 years due to automation. Nearly 60% of Australian students (70% in VET) are currently studying or training for occupations where at least two thirds of jobs will be automated. It found tomorrow’s young people risk losing the opportunity to gain crucial work experience, employability skills and entry-level roles in the labour force.

Foundation for Young Australians: The New Work Order — Young people are likely to be disproportionately hurt by automation. Young people tend to get their break into the labour market, or their first few jobs, like retail, admin, and laboring. These early work experiences and junior roles often help young people ‘learn to work’. These fields are highly exposed to the impact of technology and are forecast to be highly affected by automation. Economists have forecast that jobs like checkout operators, receptions, personal assistants and fast food workers will either be lost or radically changed by technology. By contrast, young people tend not to get their foothold in the workforce in occupations that are less exposed to automation, such as managers and professionals. Less than 20% of young people are employed in these more secure occupations.

Bill Gates — “Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses … it’s progressing, technology over time will reduce demand for jobs,particularly at the lower end of skill set. 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

Mark Zuckerberg — “I think 10 years from now computers will be better than humans at reading, listening, talking, and other things. So we are developing this.” Larry Page — “You can’t wish away these things from happening, they are going to happen, You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.”

Think of these Fetch robots combined with Self driving cars in 20 years time and how they will disrupt jobs in physical retail and logistics. The retail industry employs 2.77 million people in the UK, it is the UK’s largest private sector employer. A third of all those who work in the retail sector are below the age of 25 (the whole economy average is 25%). The Logistics is the UK’s fifth biggest industry employing more than 2 million people across 65,000 organisations.

Just these 2 examples of advanced mobile robotics can cause huge amounts of disruption because businesses and startups will utilise autonomous vehicles and stock picker/placer robots for factories instantly as they will see the potential to out-compete rivals and increase profits by being able to deliver items safely, quickly and more convenient times at lower costs.

A new report was carried out by Oxford Economics and reveals that replacing members of staff incurs significant recruitment costs(£30,614 per employee). The report analysed the cost implication of staff turnover in five different sectors: Retail, Legal, Accountancy, Media & Advertising and IT & Tech.

The University of Oxford looked at how computerization will affect jobs in the US. They found that 70% if low skilled jobs are at high risk of automation. According to the report, The Future of Employment, the Oxford professors found that Accountants and Auditors have a 94%, Retail Salesperson 92% and Cashiers have a 97% probability of being automated within 20 years.

When a company has to make a decision between an upfront cost to hire a new accountant(~£30k) + wages or cheaper software, which will make more financial sense to shareholders? It is in the interest of every capitalist company to employ a minimum number of workers, pay them a minimum salary and have the highest productivity to maximise profits.

Andrew Ng ( Chief Scientist at Baidu Research) — “I do think there’s a significant risk of technological unemployment over the next few decades, many people are doing routine, repetitive jobs. Unfortunately, technology is especially good at automating routine, repetitive work. It’s also not just about full automation. For example, if 50 percent of a radiologist’s job can be automated, this will put pricing pressure on their salaries.”

Higher skilled people may have to take lower skilled jobs as a result of disruption. Many low skilled people will struggle to compete with displaced higher skilled workers, outsourcing and machines which will work 24/7, every day of the year with no breaks, holidays, sick days, lateness, distractions, tiredness, hangovers, complaints, strikes, wage rises, overtime pay, training or retraining, compensation, insurance, severance pay, contract negotiations, bonuses, maternity leave, law suits or pensions.

Martin Ford it is certainly correct that technology creates new types of jobs and also constantly changes the mix of skills required to perform those jobs. The question is whether progress will create enough new positions to absorb the victims of automation — and whether these new jobs will be accessible to people with average capability. Despite all the hype about entirely new types of work that would have been unimaginable to previous generations, the reality is that the vast majority of our workforce is employed in traditional occupations. The most common occupations in the US are salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, office clerk and driver. Indeed, one recent analysis found that about 90% of the US workforce is employed in occupations that existed 100 years ago.

If not enough new jobs are not created at the rate of disruption, many people could find themselves unable to find work. The market system is dependent on customers, and if large numbers of consumers (perhaps even a majority) are without any means to purchase goods and services, the market economy cannot succeed.

Your taxes may go up as a consequence, public services be reduced and in the worst case scenario it could cause another recession. The mantra “My jobs safe, it can’t be automated, I‘ll be ok’ is very short sighted. Even Billionaire CEO’s are worrying about this. Technology will disrupt almost all sectors of the economy. I discuss technological disruption and how it will affect jobs in much more detail in the article below: Exponential Job Disruption.

Jeremy Howard — “So we now know that computers can learn, and computers can learn to do things that we actually sometimes don’t know how to do ourselves, or maybe can do them better than us.

So I’m very excited about the opportunities. I’m also concerned about the problems. The problem here is that every area in blue on this map is somewhere where services are over 80 percent of employment. What are services? These are services.

These are also the exact things that computers have just learned how to do. So 80 percent of the world’s employment in the developed world is stuff that computers have just learned how to do. What does that mean? ‘Well, it’ll be fine. They’ll be replaced by other jobs. For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists.’…Well, not really. It doesn’t take data scientists very long to build these things. For example, these four algorithms were all built by the same guy. So if you think, oh, it’s all happened before, we’ve seen the results in the past of when new things come along and they get replaced by new jobs, what are these new jobs going to be? It’s very hard for us to estimate this, because human performance grows at this gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually grows in capability exponentially.

And we’re here. So currently, we see the things around us and we say, “Oh, computers are still pretty dumb.” Right? But in five years’ time, computers will be off this chart. So we need to be starting to think about this capability right now. ‘Well, computers can’t really think, they don’t emote, they don’t understand poetry, we don’t really understand how they work.’ So what? Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do. If economists are going to claim that there will be new industries which require human input, I think they need to explain exactly what the human will be doing, and why the computer would not be able to do it at least as well.

Education

Technological growth, and the accompanying changes in business models will make the continuous adaptation of skill sets absolutely fundamental for successful participation in the labour market yet gaining an entirely new skill is currently very expensive.

The data, published by the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), show that 130 out of 172 universities and colleges, 76 per cent, will charge £9,000 for at least one course in 2015–16. At 44 universities, including Russell Group members Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and York, all courses cost the maximum.

If you move out you will need maintenance loans to cover rent and other cost. A maintenance loan of up to £8,000 in London or £5,500 outside the capital is available to students for help with living costs. Rising rent is making it more financially difficult for many students. Currently, students from families with annual incomes of £25,000 can get an extra loan of £3,387 a year to help with finance.

So for a years study(if you are poor and study in london) you are looking at roughly £9k course fee + £8k maintenance loan + £3k extra maintenance loan which is roughly £20,000 a year. So if you fail or don’t like your course in your 1st year that’s how much it could cost you. At 18 thats a lot of pressure to make and a possible huge financial repercussions if the wrong decision is made.

Universities with “high-quality teaching” will be allowed to raise tuition fees in line with inflation from 2017–18, George Osborne has announced. So poor students studying in London can expect to leave uni with over £60,000 of debt if they study a 3 year course, which is set to increase even more in a few years. Yet all this debt may not be worth it at the end for some graduates.

The majority of UK university graduates are working in jobs that do not require a degree, with over-qualification at “saturation point”, a report claims. Overall, 58.8% of graduates are in jobs deemed to be non-graduate roles, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It said the number of graduates had now “significantly outstripped” the creation of high-skilled jobs. One in five graduates are earning less than the average for someone educated to A-level standard according to figures published by the ONS in 2011.