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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
CAREERS
Generation squeeze
Just when they should be at their peak, Gen Xers are being passed over for promotions and cut out of the C-suite
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A COUPLE OF months ago, we brought you data from Ipsos that concluded those sitting at the top of the wealth pile are not the boomers, nor the plucky millennials, but Gen Xers, with around 35 per cent of total wealth under their control.
“With boomers about to exit the power spotlight, it’s Gen X who will be calling the shots well into the 2030s,” Ipsos’ Generations Report stated.
But while they may have the wealth, corporate power is increasingly eluding them, with Gen Xers (many of whom believed that if they waited in the wings long enough, they would be next to inherit the keys to the kingdom) now finding themselves being bypassed.
According to new research, Gen X is being pinched between generations. Many boomers are holding on: 41.5 per cent of chief executives are at least 60 years old, up from 35.1 per cent in 2017,” reads a Wall Street Journal report. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except the millennials are quickly catching up. “Over the same period, the share of CEOs in their 30s and 40s has grown to 15.1 percent from 13.8 percent.”
One researcher is dubbing it the barbell phenomenon in the C-Suite. “Gen X is being squeezed in the middle,” said The Conference Board’s Matteo Tonello. Shawn Cole, president of executive recruiting firm Cowen Partners, summed it up concisely: “[Gen X] assume when their boss retires, they’re going to get the seat. A lot of folks are going to be disappointed.”
You can see this effect in action. Red Lobster, fresh off its disastrous unlimited shrimp debacle, appointed 35-year-old Damole Ademolekun as its CEO last year; Kickstarter appointed 33-year-old Everette Taylor to the CEO post in 2022. In an AI-forward environment, boomers are looking around for younger, tech-savvy successors ― and not at their long-time, Gen-X subordinates.
“Gen X is simply being overlooked at work in general,” wrote Emma Burleigh in Fortune. “Due to workplace ageism and the expectation they’ll retire soon, Gen X is being passed up on career opportunities. About 22 per cent of employees aged 40 and up say their workplaces skip over older workers for challenging assignments, and 16 per cent say they’ve witnessed a pattern of being passed over for promotions in favour of younger staffers.”
If there is a point in Gen X’s favour, it’s that they’ve seen this before ― the internet upended the job market about 25 years ago, and AI is doing it again. They are, if nothing else, a resilient generation. “The ‘latchkey generation’ doesn’t require hand-holding,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “If AI is the biggest workplace disruption since the internet, then Gen Xers who survived the previous big shift can be a steadying presence now.”
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REMOTE WORK
What the job-jugglers can teach us about AI
Remote workers with second and third jobs are super savvy when it comes to AI productivity ― and they’re more than happy to talk about it
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THE PANDEMIC WFH era created an odd creature in the workforce that we’ve written about now and then in Worklife: the sneaky job-juggler, who has two or more full-time gigs going at once.
A new report from AI Resume Builder wanted to look at how the job-jugglers were faring. They found, first off, that around five per cent of full-time U.S. workers, and as many as one in eight Gen Z workers, are holding down multiple full-time jobs. They also found that many are using AI productivity tools and large language models (LLMs) to do it ― and not working as long as you might think.
“Most workers holding multiple jobs report working under 50 hours a week in total ― aided significantly by automation and AI-powered productivity tools,” the report stated. A growing number are even doing multiple full-time jobs in under 40 hours a week.
AI is central to this, with 64 per cent of job-jugglers employing AI productivity tools and LLMs to get the job(s) done. “AI plays a crucial role in helping me manage my time,” one respondent told the surveyors. Others expressed that scheduling, naturally, presents the biggest challenge for job-juggling, but that AI picks up the ball to optimize task assignment, resource allocation and route planning.
All of which lays out some interesting talking points about the deployment of AI in the workplace. When we talk about AI being used as a productivity tool, there’s often an air of generalization about what that actually means; it’s somewhat rare to find frank discussions of what kind of uses workers are organically putting AI to. Plus, there’s a persistent sense of anxiety around admitting to using AI as being a form of cheating.
Job-jugglers would appear to have no such compunctions (they’re sort of already cheating the system, in one sense), and thus you get a slightly clearer picture of what AI tools mean in the hands of regular employees. Sixty-five per cent use AI to summarize documents; 62 per cent use it to summarize meetings and handle emails; 58 per cent are automating regular tasks and about the same percentage are generating full reports with AI tools. It’s boring, mundane stuff ― but it’s the boring stuff that is the meat and potatoes of workload management.
Rather than unethical, younger generations “are more likely to see working multiple jobs not only as possible, but positive,” said AI Resume Builder’s Rachel Serwetz. “Gen Z’s comfort and familiarity with AI also gives them an edge in productivity, efficiency and managing workloads.”
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Terry Talk: Ignoring rules ― bold or reckless?
| The Titan sub disaster shows the deadly consequences of ignoring rules. In leadership, policies aren’t red tape ― they're safeguards that protect lives, reputations and organizations. True leaders respect guardrails, hold themselves accountable and make sure everyone gets home safe. | | | |
EMPLOYMENT LAW
Getting rid of the ghost
Come 2026, employers in Ontario will have to stop ghosting candidates
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NEW ANTI-GHOSTING RULES are set to come into effect in Ontario at the end of this year, and it will be cause for celebration for anyone who’s ever interviewed for a job and then never heard back.
Starting in 2026, employers with at least 25 employees will be required to inform candidates whether or not they got the job within 45 days of a job interview. They will also have to disclose whether a vacancy is actively being filled, plus whether artificial intelligence is being used to screen and select candidates.
For many, this is a landmark step in fixing a broken hiring market.
“Kudos to Ontario for being the grown up in the room,” wrote IT recruiting firm Kovasys IT recruitment. “Tech companies are out here building AI to automate interviews but can’t figure out how to automate feedback. To every hiring manager ghosting candidates after three-plus rounds: you’re not busy, you’re just disrespectful and you’re bleeding top talent.”
Recruiters have their own gripes with the modern hiring process, so many are cheering this on as well. A recruiter who helps broker an interview process that ends in a ghosting often catches some collateral flak for their role, even if their influence is more perceived than actual. Bonnie Dilber, recruiting lead at Zapier, praised Ontario’s move. “That feels like a minimum expectation,” she told CNBC. “People who apply to jobs deserve to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.”
Efforts to do the same in other jurisdictions have started, but with mixed results. A similar bill in New Jersey faced stiff opposition from business groups. Others are being looked at. But for anyone in the job market, Ontario looks like a candidate’s paradise.
“It took actual legislation to get employers to do the bare minimum ― send a damn email,” wrote marketing pro Stephanie Wandell. “I hope this goes national. Hell, I hope it goes global.”
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TECHNOLOGY
When AI goes rogue
An AI ran an office vending machine. It ended just how you’d think it would, but worse
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SHOULD YOU BE a bit worried about technology, AI and your job security, perhaps you’ll be heartened by this fun experiment, where the AI firm Anthropic wanted to test how autonomous their Claude language model could be, by letting it run the office vending machine as a shopkeeper named Claudius.
“The mission to AI: be profitable,” said Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “The result of vending machine owner Claudius: spectacular failure.”
Anthropic explains that it partnered with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation company, to test this, giving its LLM an instruction to turn a profit while running a vending machine. It put the AI model in charge of some of the more complex tasks ― managing inventory, setting prices and so on. The humans in this experiment did the grunt work of stocking the fridge, while the “wholesaler” the machine thought it was ordering from was Andon Labs.
“As AI becomes more integrated into the economy, we need more data to better understand its capabilities and limitations,” Anthropic explained. They had previously worked with Andon Labs to simulate how this experiment might go, then decided to give it a go in real-world conditions.
“The business itself is fairly straightforward,” Anthropic wrote. “Failure to run it successfully would suggest that ‘vibe management’ will not yet become the new ‘vibe coding.’ Success, on the other hand, suggests ways in which existing businesses might grow faster or new business models might emerge (while also raising questions about job displacement).”
The experiment, as Anthropic predicted, ran into a few hiccups. “If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” they wrote. After one customer jokingly requested that it start stocking tungsten cubes, the vending machine began ordering tungsten cubes, which broke the budget. It then refused an offer from one customer to pay $100 for Irn-Bru, instead accepting only $15. Anthropic also reported that it was too easily cajoled into discounts. In about a month, it ran out of money after a large order of metal cubes (the list of odd behaviours alone in the report make it worth reading).
Funny? Yes, but also insightful, as Anthropic points out. “This experiment has already shown us a world ― co-created by Claudius and its customers ― that’s more curious than we could have expected,” they wrote. “We think this experiment suggests that AI middle managers are plausibly on the horizon. We don’t know if AI middle managers would actually replace many existing jobs or instead spawn a new category of businesses. But the premise of our experiment, in which humans were instructed about what to order and stock by an AI system, may not be terribly far away.”
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