The Week in Jobs: The AI Jobs Apocalypse Debate, a Trade Jobs Boom, & an RTO Firing Gone Wrong

Pete and Peter promised something lighter this week, and for the most part, they deliver. They open with a new Goldman Sachs report weighing whether an "AI jobs apocalypse" is actually coming. Goldman's answer is more measured than the headlines: disruption spread over roughly 10 years, concentrated mostly in entry-level roles. MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu takes a tougher stance in the same conversation, predicting millions of displacements and noting that "no general law of economics says that job creation must match job destruction." Pete and Peter don't fully agree on the timeline, but both expect entry-level workers to feel it first.From there, they talk through an AI phone auto-attendant demo they sat in on this week, a Deutsche Bank report claiming AI productivity gains are still years off (a claim Pete and Peter push back on), and why AI adoption looks so different depending on whether a company is an early adopter, a cautious tester, or still on the sidelines.Then the good news: ZipRecruiter data shows apprentice-trained trade workers earn a median of $91,000 a year versus $65,000 for self-taught workers, construction jobs are up 34% year over year, and manufacturing is up 32%, all while most white-collar hiring sits flat. Pete and Peter get into why trade schools still lag far behind colleges on marketing and admissions, and why that gap matters more as AI squeezes entry-level office work.They also cover the NFIB small business index, where 84% of small businesses actively hiring say they still can't find qualified applicants, and close with a Wall Street Journal story that's hard to make up: a co-founder at Barnhill Investments who helped write the company's return-to-office policy was fired under that same policy for not coming in.4 Corner Resources' quarterly Employee Mindset Survey results just came in, and Pete and Peter will dig into what workers are thinking about the job market on next week's episode. In the meantime, visit www.4cornerresources.com for hiring and job search resources.