What will the job market look like in 20 years time?

Politicians may say the UK is slowly crawling out of the depths of the economic crisis. But what does that mean for ordinary workers?

In 2014, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation painted a gloomy picture of things to come. "Poverty and inequality are likely to increase," it said. "The UK has a large number of low-paid, low-skilled jobs compared to other developed countries. People working in these jobs are more likely to face insecurity and less likely to receive training, hampering their chances of progressing."

Rather than fears over unemployment, experts say the real concern for the future jobs market is about pay. "There are always going to be enough jobs," says John Philpott, director of The Jobs Economist. "The bigger question is what sort of income will those jobs provide? I think we're going to see a continued issue with large-scale, low-income employment."

Even if pay does improve slightly over the years, it's likely to stay relatively low, according to Ian Brinkley, the chief economist at The Work Foundation. He says although it seems unlikely that wages can stay so low for much longer, it's equally unlikely that wage growth will go back to pre-recession levels any time soon. "There will still be a lot of people competing for jobs in the labour market," he says. "Living standards of the future are going to depend a lot more on what's happening to prices and inflation, rather than the ability of people to bid-up wages in the workplace."

Polarisation

The story of the jobs market over the last few decade has not just been one of peaks and troughs; Britain's economy has been marked by wage inequality. And with more people going to university than ever before, the polarisation between skilled and unskilled workers is increasing.

Charlie Ball, deputy director of research at HECSU says: "In the UK we've got a tale of two jobs markets. In general the graduate jobs market is moving forward. But the non-graduate jobs market is still well down on where it was pre-recession. So it will continue to be difficult for graduates, but nowhere near to the level of people who don't have that kind of qualification."

Ball says that the trend over the next 20 years will be towards a higher skilled workforce, with the degree becoming increasingly valuable. Although graduates may not have great salaries now, he says they are far more likely to get jobs which hold the possibility of a pay rise once the economy gets moving again. But for people without training and qualification, the future jobs market doesn't look very bright.

That's not to say graduates will be in a brilliant position, either. Indeed, part of the problem is that there are not enough skilled jobs, so graduates are eating into the unskilled portion of the jobs market.

Professor Kate Purcell, director of Futuretrack says this situation is unlikely to change soon. "Is the demand for graduates going to increase to catch up with the supply? Actually, probably not, because the number of graduates in jobs that don't require higher education has been increasing really quite rapidly. So saying that there's suddenly going to be a huge increase in demand for people with the kind of knowledge and skills that universities produce is probably a bit optimistic."

As well as polarisation between skilled and unskilled labour, polarisation between sectors will also grow – especially with the rise of technology. "The wage premium is much higher for the sciences than the arts," says Brinkley. "The last thing you should do is go into the fine arts if you want to earn any money."

Although some sectors show signs of being more lucrative than others, scare stories about so-called skills shortages are likely to be hyperbolic. "It's more that employers can't get people they want at the wages they're currently prepared to pay them," Philpott explains. In fact, the only genuine skills shortages may be in some sciences and engineering sectors, he says.

While the tech sector inevitably booms, it will also likely displace some traditional jobs. "Technology may take out even more jobs than it has already," says Philpott. "A lot of white-collar jobs will probably go the same way as manual jobs have gone."

Young workers

Experts are less agreed on the future of unpaid internships – a culture that many see as exploitative. "You would expect the internship culture to hopefully fade away a bit as we recover from the recession, because employers will not be able to afford to be so choosy," says Ball. "I think it will become less and less acceptable to exploit graduates in that way."

Brinkley is less optimistic: "There's very little chance of it ending at all," he says. "Firms put such a huge premium on someone having work experience before they will take them on that it's become almost a privileged pathway into work. For some jobs, unless you've got a few internships, they're probably not going to look at you."

But the future is not all doom and gloom for younger generations. Indeed, Brinkley says the UK's jobs market is a lot kinder than some other European countries.

Similarly, Purcell points out that the market has become a lot more diversified, with a whole range of jobs that weren't available for previous generations.

In her research, she has followed graduates to see how they do in the jobs market. "In the short term, a substantial proportion have not been able to do the kind of jobs that they had hoped to do," she says. "But when we surveyed them again a few years later, most of these recent graduates were quite optimistic about their long-term options."

So should teenagers be getting stressed out about the jobs market? "It's very difficult to predict beyond a few years because things can change so much, and I've got no crystal ball," Purcell says. "If I was a GCSE student now, I hope I wouldn't be obsessed by what I was going to do when I grew up!"

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