how well do you know the jobs market?

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Work lives are deeply personal but understanding the realities of the broader labour 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.

Remote work

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?

Gender pay gap

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 organisations from punishing workers who share details of their salaries.

Have their efforts helped to narrow the pay gap?

AI

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 technology.

Workplaces have scrambled to keep up with, and leverage, the rapidly evolving technology. Employers have started to offer tools to staff and many have scouted the market for AI specialists. Recruitment has been competitive, with the number of AI-linked job postings soaring this year and many senior roles commanding big salaries.

Physicians vs bankers

Industrial action this year in the UK saw junior doctors receive a 22 per cent pay rise over two years, in an effort to address 15 years of inflation-linked pay erosion contributing to the NHS’s loss of doctors, or “Drexit”. Increasing demands on productivity and fear of burnout are striking similar tones with doctors in the US. But how does the country’s medical sector compare with other industries in terms of recruitment?

Many sectors have reverted back to the same recruitment rate they had pre-Covid. But population growth in the US, particularly in those aged 65 and over, combined with a third of physicians being likely to retire over the next decade, has ensured demand in medical fields has remained high.

Older Workers

As life expectancy has increased, social security budgets have come under pressure. Facing an ageing population and a shortage of workers, many countries, including the US and UK, have increased the age at which citizens can access statutory pensions — often against strong opposition.

French workers went on strike after President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a rise in the state pension age, while China said it would increase its retirement age for the first time since 1978 to expand its labour force.

While the number of participants in the typical working age bracket of 15-64 has barely changed across OECD countries since the 1990s, what impact are these trends having on the older generation?

Self-employment

The lure of being your own boss is perhaps greater now than it has ever been. The advent of working from home has given people greater flexibility and a rapidly-expanding gig economy provided opportunities to pick up extra work. But what proportion of the UK workforce is currently self-employed?

The pandemic, and the UK furlough scheme that came with it, meant many people who had previously identified as self-employed were able to reclassify themselves as employed to claim support, according to the Office for National Statistics.

This means some elements of the drop are artificial but other factors — such as the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that Uber’s workers are employees and IR35 reforms classifying some self-employed people as “employed for tax purposes” — have also contributed.