Our Chicago: 2024 Jobs Outlook, Workplace Trends
CHICAGO (WLS) -- A new year may have some people resolved to find a new job. As you update your resume and start networking, there are some difficulties you may or may not face in keeping that resolution.
Tom Gimbel is the Founder and CEO of the Chicago staffing agency, LaSalle Network.
"If you're if you're starting the year and everybody's big on resolutions and what you want is, are you going to go out and get the job that's going to make you happy? And I think a lot of times people say, I'm not happy in my current job. It doesn't it's not the company. It's the actual role."
For example, Gimbel says if you're an accountant at one company and you leave your job to be an accountant at another.
"If you don't like doing accounting, you're not going to be happier," Gimbel said. "You might make $5,000 or $10,000 more, that doesn't solve the happiness bug."
He says job seekers have to be honest with themselves.
"You gotta look in the mirror every day and say 'do I like what I do' because if you like it, you're going to give more to it," Gimbel said. "It doesn't mean you have to be the best from day one, but you have to enjoy the work and that'll propel you to give more of yourself."
Once you've answered that question, you might be asking, who is hiring?
"I'm very bullish on the market for 2024," Gimbel said. "And so what we saw with the December jobs report is that we we brought in more than 200,000 new jobs in December. Now, the bad news is of the 216,000, only 150,000 were private sector. The rest were government jobs. But it does signal to the economy and the overall market that companies are going to be hiring. And we're seeing that from tech sector manufacturing, hospitality and service industry, as well as health care. The companies are hiring and is going to be a good it's a good time for people to look."
Dr. Robert Bruno is a Professor of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois. He's also the author of the book "What Work Is."
For many people during the pandemic, the location where they did their work changed. And while many are back in the office, Bruno thinks working from home is here to stay.
"It's very popular," Bruno said. "Workers who could work remotely seem to want to work remotely high numbers, particularly younger workers between the ages of 25 and 35. So while it is still a minority of people that are working full-time at home and a smaller number of they that work any amount of time remotely, most people are not working remotely. It's very popular and I don't think it's going away."
A rising trend in the workplace is artificial intelligence. Bruno says the university has done some research.
"And more and more jobs look like they would be vulnerable to some kind of impact of AI" Bruno said. "Some jobs maybe go away. Other jobs just get changed. So if you think of work as a bundle of tasks, well, maybe the tasks change. And if the tasks change, then maybe the skill requirements change."
