Work lives are deeply personal but understanding the realities of the broader labor market involves looking at the data — from measuring the ratio of remote postings to monitoring wage inequality. The pandemic, cost of living crisis and advancement of AI have had profound effects on work and recruitment. We have picked six trends for you to test your knowledge of how such factors are shaping the jobs market.
How representative are your experiences of work life? See how accurately you can fill in the missing information in the incomplete charts below. As countries have returned to normal after the pandemic, many workplaces are still grappling with the best schedules to suit their staff and business. The share of remote and hybrid job postings in many countries is still much higher than in 2019 as businesses figure out a long-term balance for office attendance. But this year has experienced something of a reversal. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy announced a tough five-day office mandate in September. The move made him a figurehead of a growing number of leaders pushing for an end to remote work, including Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase and Elon Musk at Tesla. Is the US becoming an outlier? In the US, wages have grown in real terms since 2000. But have they increased at the same pace for men and women? Cities and states across the US, as well as in the UK, have introduced new transparency laws in an attempt to narrow a well-documented gender-based pay gap. Some regions have banned employers from asking about candidates’ salary history, and barred organizations from punishing workers who share details of their salaries. Have their efforts helped to narrow the pay gap? The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 brought excitement and anxiety, as it opened up a powerful new resource for many white-collar workers — but also increased fears they might lose their job to technolog