Key takeaways
Youth Unemployment Spike: Remote-eligible roles like software engineering and financial analysis have caused unemployment for college grads under 29 to rise from 3.1% to 3.7%, while older workers’ rates declined.
Mentorship Gap: In-person feedback boosts young workers’ productivity and development, but remote setups reduce mentorship, creating “scarring effects” for recent graduates.
Hiring Discrepancy: Companies favor experienced staff for remote or hybrid roles, limiting entry-level opportunities, while physical-presence jobs like nursing see normalized hiring.
Just a few years ago, remote work was something like a matter of life or death. In the pandemic-stricken early years of the 2020s, most white-collar workers who fled to the country or even changed their living situations counted their blessings as bosses seemed inclined to let home offices be even as lockdown orders expired. Almost half of full-time U.S. employees were working from home by fall 2021, of which some 90% said they wanted to stay remote in some shape or form.
They may have gotten their wish. Of jobs that could be done remotely, 78% of U.S. work locations are currently either remote or hybrid, according to Gallup data, up from 40% in 2019. Meanwhile, fully on-site roles went from 60% of placements in 2019 to 22% this year.
But for every millennial or Gen Xer happily able to take calls in sweatpants Mondays and Fridays, mounting evidence suggests that working in your sweatpants is the real reason, not AI adoption, behind the plunge in entry-level hiring halfway through the decade.