Work in the time of covid

If there’s at least a single certainty 2021 holds for me it’s that it will involve looking for a job. Of the near million redundancies announced since the covid pandemic began my own was eventually added to the tally - communicated through zoom (how else?), by phone, as I stood in a Wiltshire field, on day one of half-term, and effective as of 31st December. Happy new year!!

It was a shock, but not entirely unexpected: I worked for an education charity that since lockdown #1 had struggled to deliver its in-school programmes at a rate that fulfilled its raison d’etre and merited its funding. A last ditch internal restructure involved scrapping my role, putting me on the shelf - albeit on furlough for a few months: thanks, Rishi - in what is plainly an employer’s market.

A job I managed to secure an interview for at the tail end of last year had over 230 applicants. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is not uncommon: former colleagues who shared my fate have learned during their own job searches that they’ve been among several hundred applicants for any one role, friends of former colleagues report the same, and best-avoided news coverage often features case studies that illustrate the statistics of qualified, experienced, professional people laid off at the start of the pandemic who remain out of work a year on.

The business magazine, Forbes predicts that covid has changed the job market forever - with virtual hiring, remote working and global job-hunting opportunities here to stay. Certainly it transformed my own experience of being employed - with remote working, a team reduced in size through furlough, and an urgent need to refocus and adapt, the boundaries between work and home-life became so blurred that hours on the job inevitably began earlier, ended later and gate-crashed into weekends. Suddenly colleagues one would ordinarily leave home to spend an allotted amount of time with, in a shared physical environment a commute away, were being beamed into our homes via screen several times a week like soap characters - with the storyline to boot. For all that we were disparate and remote, there evolved a greater intimacy, and intensity to professional relationships enabled by technology and compounded by shared circumstances.

And now, lockdown part three, the sequel’s sequel: a child learning-from-home and a partner out at work. What room is there for the remaining ‘house-parent’ to be immersed in 8-10 hour working days - even if they can get a job? With three meals plus snacks to conjure up and clear away, home-schooling to monitor and screen time to police, I’m channeling Cinderella and Mary Poppins on and off all day and there’s nothing remotely Disney about any of it,.. unless Disney has a differently branded hand in psycho kitchen-drama long form TV. It. Is. In.Tense.

Moreover, low skies and a chill factor combined with the indeterminate length of this latest lockdown have made it even more wearing than last summer’s which at least had a globally warmed heatwave and novelty value in its favour. That’s ‘novelty’ as in new. Now we’re jaded and fatigued. There have been tears before bedtime (before lunchtime) more than once in my house and they’ve not always been shed by the youngest of us. If new year’s eve was a psychological line in the sand beyond which better beckoned it didn't take us long to realise that all January 1st marked was the start of another 12 months. Barely 3 weeks in, things are beginning to take on a suspiciously semi-permanent air. Like being on remand.

If there’s one truth the last year has illuminated for us all it is surely that anything is possible. But while hope and opportunity reside in that truth so too does pessimism, what if...a virus mutation renders the vaccine obsolete? What if... schools don’t go back till after summer?? What if...covid is to humans what asteroids were to the dinosaurs and we’re beginning to play out the end of days?? (Hysterical, I know).

The good and irrefutable news is that every pandemic in history has eventually come to an end. Diseases may not disappear, but they do recede, and the extreme circumstances caused by their trajectory and mass invasion into the human population also abate. In other words, this too shall pass.

My favourite vision of the future is one predicted by Yale Professor, Dr Nicholas Christakis: that beyond the vaccine’s roll-out and our socio-economic recovery, we will eventually enter a second ‘roaring twenties,’ evidenced by patterns in history that have followed previous pandemics and coloured by people relentlessly seeking out social interactions, including ‘sexual licentiousness’, liberal spending and a ‘reverse of religiosity’. Or as a friend of mine put it: “We’re all gonna go f*cking feral.”

Based on Dr Christakis’s soothsaying it could be 2024 before I no longer have to compete with several hundred applicants for a single vacancy. Meanwhile, a study by Oxford Economics foresees that AI will have taken over 20 million jobs by 2030. If both are true - between younger, more dynamic human beings and sentient machines my post pandemic employment prospects could be looking slim.

Maybe it’s time to take a leaf out of the government’s book: rethink, reskill, reboot...tuck away my keyboard, and become a ballet dancer.