Up to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI, according to a report by a leading educational research charity.<\/p>\n
The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) said.<\/p>\n
Highly skilled professionals, on the other hand, were forecast to be more in demand as AI and technological advances increase workloads \u201cat least in the short to medium term\u201d. Overall, the report expects the UK economy to add 2.3m jobs by 2035, but unevenly distributed.<\/p>\n
The findings stand in contrast to other recent<\/a> research<\/a> suggesting AI will affect highly skilled, technical occupations such as software engineering and management consultancy more than trades and manual work.<\/p>\n Research from King\u2019s College published in October estimated<\/a> that \u201chigher-paying firms\u201d suffered job losses of roughly 9.4% between 2021 and 2025, with much of this period falling after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.<\/p>\n The UK government lists<\/a> management consultants, psychologists and legal professionals among the occupations \u201cmost exposed to AI\u201d, whereas \u201csports players\u201d, \u201croofers\u201d and \u201cbricklayers\u201d are less likely to be replaced.<\/p>\n Last week, the law firm Clifford Chance revealed it was laying off<\/a> 10% of business services staff at its London base \u2013 about 50 roles \u2013 attributing the change partly to AI. The head of PwC also publicly walked back plans to hire 100,000 people between 2021 and 2026, saying \u201cthe world is different\u201d and artificial intelligence had changed its hiring needs.<\/p>\n Jude Hillary, one of the report\u2019s authors, said that NFER\u2019s work \u2013 which is based on longer-term economic modelling of the UK labour market \u2013 suggests predictions about AI-driven job losses may be premature.<\/p>\n He suggested layoffs attributed to the uptake of AI may be driven by a sluggish UK economy, factors such as rising national insurance costs and employers being risk-averse.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this general uncertainty about where things are going, how long it takes to improve. There\u2019s lots of talk about AI and automation without any real substance about it. Lots of employers are worried about it,\u201d Hillary said.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cAnd probably what\u2019s happening is a lot of employers are just sitting tight, I would say.\u201d<\/p>\n Hillary said he expected the overall effects of AI on the UK workforce to be complex: increasing the demand for some professional roles; decreasing the demand for many entry-level roles; and eroding the demand for many lower-skilled professions. This latter, he said, was most concerning, as it would be difficult for people who lost lower-skilled jobs to reskill appropriately in a changing economy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe additional jobs that we\u2019re getting in the labour market tend to be professional and associate professionals \u2026 Displaced workers, the one to three million that we talk about in our report, face significant barriers to get back into the labour market,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Up to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-157942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}