Industria
A quarter of the UK workforce expect to quit in the next 12 months as the cost of living bites - PwC research
Strikingly, 12% of workers in the UK have more than one job, with 70% citing earning more money as the reason why. The economic squeeze is also driving up pay demands - over a third (34%) of UK workers are planning to ask for a pay rise in the next twelve months, up 7 percentage points from 2022. In comparison, the global proportion of workers planning to ask for a pay increase jumped from 35% to 42%.
While higher pay is one motivating factor for changing jobs, job fulfilment is another key priority for the UK workforce. The survey finds that over a fifth (21%) of the workforce are dissatisfied with their current role - highlighting that despite economic and job uncertainty, people are still looking to move. Moreover, one in five (21%) feel like they are regularly overworked and that their workloads have been unmanageable over the last 12 months. Lack of resourcing is most often the factor indicated as causing an unmanageable workload (44%), most acutely seen in the Health, Government/Public Services and Retail & Consumer sectors - other factors include unreasonable targets (33%) and lack of management support (25%).
UK workers are seemingly less enthusiastic about AI than their global counterparts - under a fifth (19%) believe AI will increase their productivity and efficiency at work (versus 31% globally) and only 17% think AI will create opportunities to learn valuable new skills (27% globally). A further 12% believe AI will require them to learn new skills they are not confident they have the capacity to learn.
Nearly half of UK workers (47%) are oblivious to the impact of AI on their job in the next five years. Just over a third (32%) don't believe AI will impact their job in the next five years and a further 15% responded unsure - compared to 22% globally. Unsurprisingly, there is a generational split, with a higher proportion of the older workforce, including 47% of Baby Boomers and 37% of Gen-X believing AI will not impact their jobs in comparison to 28% of Millennials and 18% of Gen- Z. In fact, the younger generation views AI slightly more positively, with 19% of Gen-Z and 17% of Millennials believing that AI will create new job opportunities for them.
The UK workforce is facing a rapidly changing workplace environment, yet the report highlights a disconnect between employees and employers. Nearly two thirds (63%) of workers feel they have human- centric skills which are not clear from their education or job history alone and when thinking about the future, nearly half (49%) of UK workers agree that the skills required for their job will change significantly in the next five years. Interestingly, over two-thirds of employees (63%) believe soft skills will be important to their careers and almost half (46%) believe employers are overly focused on the narrow confines of job history. The awareness of the need for upskilling is higher amongst more skilled staff (51% compared to 15% in unskilled staff). This points to a divergence in the workforce where unskilled labour could fall behind further if the opportunities for upskilling are not provided. A further 21% reported that they don't believe their employer will offer them the opportunity to apply skills that are important to their career and 37% reported that they lacked confidence in their employer's ability to provide opportunities to develop transferable skills important to their career, including adaptability (56%), critical thinking (57%) and collaborative skills (53%).
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