AI and job displacement: should we be fanning the flames of fear?
Britain’s graduate jobs market has become like The Hunger Games career coaches warn, as worried parents pay up to £30,000 to help their children overcome AI’
The Times May 2026
‘In the worst-case scenario for the second wave of AI, 7.9m jobs could be displaced. . . job apocalypse’
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 2024
Apocalypse? The Hunger Games?! We like to call this use of dramatic imagery the Fire and Anguish Narrative (FAN) surrounding AI, with hyped-up concerns about productivity and job displacement increasingly prevalent in the media and political discourse. Such a narrative FANs (sorry, couldn’t resist) the flames of anxiety for educators, parents and young people, who have their sights set on a successful entry into employment.
While sensationalism sells news, we have been tracking, as providers of coaching for career starters, research on the real impact of emerging AI on the workforce. We understand, for example, that the traditional role of accountants has been evolving for nearly a decade. Research that we were aware of over six years ago indicated that the potential for automation in accounting would lead to a shift in job descriptions within firms like the Big Four. Accountants' roles are now broader, emphasising consulting and analytical skills over a lay person’s concept of a traditional beancounter’s job. This evolved skill set reflects the need to be able to interpret and utilise data rather than just processing it.
This research would seem to support the key messages shared during the recent Dubai AI Festival by experts such as Dr Hakim Hacid, chief researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Centre at the UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute. He referred to ‘transformation of the expertise and what people are expected to do’ and thinks that we must learn to collaborate with AI, understand it, guide it and use it to generate value. Just as we were taught about Dewey systems to find a library book, we must learn what to ask and how to pose the right questions to AI to execute tasks efficiently and accurately, while also understanding how to prevent it from leading us down a deep, dark, swirling vortex of misinformation and misdirection. And working with AI begins at the job application stage.
‘Beating the AI bot’ is a phrase we hear often when working with clients and their families, because it often feels as though the AI used by employers to screen applicants is out to get us, and that recruitment has become a cyber battlefield where the human David must slay the AI Goliath to have a chance of sitting across the table from a real live human being in an interview. Our view is that, just as with David’s innocuous-looking sling, a candidate’s most powerful weapon is something they happen to be carrying with them already. It is their human skills.
Along with enhanced AI literacy, human skills development must be a proactive strategic focus for career starters transitioning into work. With AI developing at pace, human beings must focus on developing our uniquely human capabilities so that we can bridge the skills gap and work with AI technology to achieve the best outcomes for ourselves, our employers, communities and economies. This begins when we are looking to identify a job opportunity. Machine reading, used commonly now to screen at least in the first stage of recruitment, is different to human reading. It is mechanical, single-minded and word-level focused. Learning and applying the communication and language skills needed to meet the reading needs of the machine requires an agile, growth mindset - a key human skill and one that is highly desirable across the world. Careers Collective coaches adopt our unique blended tutoring and coaching approach that delivers both the coaching support and the skills tuition to boost short-term success and long-term sustainability. Access to a learning platform underpinned by a Human Skills Matrix, enables our young clients to gain the human skills needed to achieve personal and career fulfilment and see the benefit of those enhanced skills immediately during the recruitment process.
So, Careers Collective really doesn’t subscribe to the Fire and Anguish Narrative that is so prevalent, but we do agree with the World Economic Forum, which, in the recently published white paper ‘New Economy Skills: Unlocking The Human Advantage’, declares that ‘In the age of artificial intelligence, the true competitive edge is being human.’
Sources:
https://www.weforum.org/publications/new-economy-skills-unlocking-the-human-advantage/