Exam season is well and truly upon us – but as AI increasingly transforms the workplace, what jobs should those currently sitting their GCSEs and A-levels be considering?
A new report published this week by accounting and auditing company, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), found that employees working in the job sectors that have embraced the use of AI, rather than resisted it, such as financial services and IT, are able to command higher wages than peers in sectors not exposed to AI.
The latest annual PwC global AI jobs barometer, which examined nearly a billion job adverts across the globe, found that average wages for those who currently work in AI-skilled jobs increased by 56% last year, a leap of 25% on 2023.
PwC’s Chief Economist, Barret Kupelian, told BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast that it’s clear already that ‘AI is inevitably a technology that will have an impact on our working lives.’
He told the programme’s co-host Rick Edwards: ‘We are seeing a consistent pick-up of AI skills across all sectors of the economy but in particular in three main sectors, the IT, financial services and professional services sector.’
Kupelian added that there was also ‘a wage premium associated with AI skills, at least for the time being’.
Asked which jobs are most likely to be untouched by AI in a decade’s time, the economist said people should look to traditional trades – with roles plumbers, electricians and decorators
He explained: ‘It appears to me that jobs that require a quite a lot of manual labour…I don’t think the technology is skilled there, in terms of augmenting those skills.’
The next generation of employees are ‘inevitably’ going to be affected by the increased reliance on AI, PwC’s Chief Economist, Barret Kupelian told BBC 5 Live Breakfast, following the accounting and auditing company’s latest annual PwC global AI jobs barometer repoirt
Elsewhere, the PwC spokesman said that roles that require ‘a high degree of judgement and creativity’ are also unlikely to be able to be automated any time soon because they require ‘bespoke skills that are quite difficult to replicate on a digital basis.’
But those exam results may not be quite as useful in the future, the report also suggests, with demand for formal degrees falling ‘especially quickly’ in AI-exposed jobs.
The report found that the percentage of AI-exposed jobs that require a degree fell from 64% in 2019 to 56% in 2024.
Phillippa O’Connor, Chief People Officer at PwC UK, said: ‘While degrees are still important for many jobs, the reduction in degree requirements suggests employers are looking at a broader range of measures to assess skills and potential.
‘Continuous learning to broaden skills, including AI and technology skills, will be more important than ever.’
Focusing on what the report revealed about the outlook for the labour market in the UK when taking AI into consideration, the economist said there were many jobs that were likely to be augmented, rather than completely automated, using AI in the future.
Reflecting on the research that suggests that the revenue of businesses that are more exposed to AI are growing faster than those that are not, he advised to err on the side of caution, saying ‘it possibly suggests there are productivity gains associated with the use of the technology but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is associated with the technology per se’.
US former tech worker Shawn K was previously a software engineer making $150K a year before getting laid off due to artificial intelligence, he says
Last week, a seasoned software engineer – once earning a comfortable six-figure salary – revealed he was now living in an RV, driving for DoorDash and battling financial insecurity, saying AI had taken his livelihood.
Shawn K – whose full legal last name is just one letter – says he’s among the early wave of knowledge workers dealing with the economic fallout of AI advancements, a trend he believes is ‘coming for basically everyone in due time.’
In a personal essay on his Substack, Shawn painted a picture of his current reality.
‘As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my six hours of DoorDash driving to make less than $200 that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th through 756th job applications that I put in over the last week for engineering roles I’m qualified or over-qualified for,’ he wrote.
He closed in on the 800 application mark in over a year of being an unemployed software engineer.
Despite owning three properties – a fixer-upper in upstate New York and two cabins on rural land – his financial situation has only worsened since being laid off from his engineering job, which paid around $150,000 annually.
He has since told DailyMail.com that he had moved to New York to care for his family and grow long-term equity with real estate, an opportunity he said didn’t exist on the West Coast for more than 15 years.
Shawn attributes his sudden unemployment and job search issues to AI.
Shawn now lives in a trailer in Central New York as he applies for jobs – but says he’s competing with bots for roles
‘Something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years,’ he wrote in his Substack, describing how AI caused him and many talented developers at his previous company to be laid off despite the company’s strong performance.
He said in his Substack that getting his resume seen has become a ‘sisyphusian task’ – in reference to a task requiring continual and often ineffective effort – and the technical interview process a ‘PTSD-inducing minefield.’
Shawn explained that companies are doing what they know best: practicing capitalism.
‘The economics are very simple: if you can produce the same product and same results while drastically cutting your expenses, what business wouldn’t do that? In fact you would have to be crazy not to,’ he wrote.
‘We have reached a time where human labor is no longer a necessary input to generate economic value, which is a drastic departure from everything that has come in history before.’
Shawn estimates he has interviewed with about 10 companies in the last year, often getting through multiple rounds but never receiving an offer.
He wrote in his Substack that he suspects his resume is ‘filtered out of consideration by some half-baked AI candidate finder service because my resume doesn’t mention enough hyper-specific bleeding-edge AI terms.’
If he makes it past the bots, he explained that he is then competing with ‘the other 1,000 applicants (bots, foreign nationals, and other displaced-by-AI tech workers) who have applied within the first two hours of a job posting going live.’
