Tremors in the Job Market: Something is shifting
Burberry, Microsoft and Gymshark all announce redundancies.
Hey there,
We’ve not been in your inbox much lately. We were just trying a new content strategy called restraint. I am sure you managed just fine without us though :)
We have also been trying to make sense of what’s really happening in the economy right now, because honestly? It all feels a bit strange, something’s off.
It’s not a full economic earthquake, yet, but there are tremors. Low-level, unsettling. A 2.8 on the Richter scale of “hmm, that’s odd”.
Redundancies everywhere, even at successful and growing companies like Microsoft and Gymshark.
The tectonic plates in our economy are shifting.
We’ve also been busy behind the scenes:, we have had explosive growth on YouTube, our watch hours in 2025 are already 5x higher than the whole of last year.
And we have had a killer run of guests, with more to come, including Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, joining us soon.
Subscribe and we will let you know when that episode drops, will be a fascinating conversation about the future of entrepreneurship and the media.
In this edition:
What’s really happening in the UK job market
Why Gen Z is stuck in a system not built for them
The AI hacks that Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future are now using on a daily basis.
Some of my favourite episodes of the year so far
Will you be at SXSW in London?
🚨 The warning signs are everywhere:
Redundancies are hitting everyone, from:
Burberry and Sainsbury’s
To Gymshark - the first in its 15 year history
Even Microsoft, supposed AI winners, are cutting back.
There are 100,000 more people unemployed than this time last year.
Nearly 10 million working-age Brits are now economically inactive.
In Birmingham — our second city — 1 in 4 people aren’t working! That’s not a deindustrialised port or coal town. It is our 2nd city for crying out loud, it should be an engine of growth.
🧩 So what’s really driving this?
We think it’s a quintuple whammy that’s colliding all at once:
Employment rights legislation making hiring and firing slower and riskier
National Insurance hikes – Tesco alone estimates this has cost them £1 billion over this parliament.
Rising minimum wage – great in principle, but challenging for small and medium employers to absorb
Trump tariffs – it just causes uncertainty everywhere. Why spend £30k on an entry level worker - when you might need to absorb a lot more soon.
AI adoption – still early, but already causing firms to look at when needing to replace workers?
It’s the economic equivalent of changing the tyres, the engine, and the driver — all while doing 70mph on the M1.
I want to dive a bit more on the minimum wage and AI below.
🔍 The Gen Z Paradox: High Costs, No Space to Learn
We’re in a strange spot
Thanks to the National Minimum Wage now sitting at £12.21/hour, even an entry-level full-time role costs:
12.21 x 7.5 hours x 5 days x 50 weeks
£23,809 in gross salary
Closer to £30,000 for employers when you factor in NICs, pensions and other overheads
That’s a big starting number and it means employers can’t afford deadweight. At that price, you have to deliver value fast.
But part of the challenge is Gen Z is arriving in the workforce later, less experienced, and often less prepared. And it’s not their fault.
This is a generation who missed out on internships, part-time jobs, even basic in-person onboarding skills because of COVID. Many finished uni from their bedrooms. Others never stepped foot in an office during those formative early years.
Now they’re being thrown into a labour market that’s demanding more, earlier, for higher cost and giving less room to learn.
Add AI into the mix, automating the entry-level work that used to be the proving ground… and you have a system that’s quietly squeezing out the very generation we need to succeed most.
🤖 AI Isn’t Coming - It’s already in the Studio
And of course, AI is not immediately replacing jobs, but it is increasing capabilities dramatically.
At Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, we’ve been experimenting behind the scenes with a lot. And this month, we did something we’ve never done before:
Ten full podcast recordings in a single week.
With senior politicians, unicorn founders, and authors at the top of their game.
How?
A big part of it is thanks to tools like Deep Research, which now help us prep smarter, faster, and deeper.
What used to take around 10 hours, compiling quotes, cross-referencing policy, building guest briefs, now takes hours. And crucially: it still feels human.
It is not an at exec level producer yet, but it is comfortably sitting at good assistant producer level.
This isn’t about replacing people, yet. It’s about boosting productivity, freeing up creativity, and letting us scale episodes in a way that simply wasn’t possible a year ago.
But it’s a reminder: the AI revolution isn’t abstract. It’s not “out there, coming for us”, it is here and happening right now.
I am going to try and get back into substacking more, each time I will share some of the other things that we have been using it for.
I have Hamish McKenzie, the founder of Substack coming on the show in June - what should i ask him? Just hit reply to this email and let me know.
👋 That’s all for now
Thanks for reading, and your support on this slightly strange journey.
As always, hit reply and let me know how these shifts are showing up in your world. And if you want to work together, on content, campaigns, or bringing future of jobs / work stories to life. drop me a line.
Let me leave with you some highlight episodes from the last couple of months:
Greg Jackson, our 200th episode to celebrate the company that has created more jobs in the last decade than anyone else:
We also did a fun documentary style video with Hawksmoor this week:
The interview i have found myself quoting at people at most, this one with Charlie Colenutt who went across the UK and interviewed 70 people about their jobs today. A brilliant read and a great interview, it may be the last snapshot of a workplace pre AI.
Have a great Bank Holiday weekend, and shout if you are going to be at SXSW in the first week of June, would be great to see you there.
Jimmy