Welcome to this week’s edition! 👋

💸 Growth in Wages is Strong, but Slowing Down

According to a recent study by Indeed, wages are still growing but the rate of growth is slowing and returning to pre-pandemic levels:

• US posted wages grew in November at a robust 6.5% year-over-year pace, up from 3.1% in November 2019.

• Nevertheless, year-over-year posted wage growth has declined substantially in recent months, falling from a peak of 9% in March 2022, a signal employers now face less-steep competition for new hires.

• Wages and salaries advertised in job postings have been rising quickest in lower-wage occupational categories, but those sectors are now seeing the biggest declines in growth.

• Stat: Almost 48% of employees in the US are expecting a raise or a promotion in 2023.

📉How is the Rise of Flexible Jobs going?

We talk a lot of the rise of remote/hybrid work, but what does it look like in the numbers? According to Timewise, 2022 is settling on a surprisingly-low 30% of jobs advertised with flexible working (though this is a broad study which includes many types of jobs - not just Tech jobs). Less surprising, is that this lower level of ‘offering’ seems to result in more employers losing out on talent that is switching for those who offer more flexibility.

🧒 Gen-Z are less tech-savy than you’d like to think

Young workers are feeling more ‘tech shame’ than their older colleagues. Yep, you read that right. According to a study of 100,000 workers in US and UK, they said they felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to only one in 25 for those aged 40 years and over. Further, 25% of the former age group would actively avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, whereas it was just 6% for the latter cohort.

Some of the key reasons:

• Being tech-savy for personal use/leisure is different than doing so at work

• No real preparation and training is done before they join a the workplace

• Gen-Z is generally more shy and less keen to ask for help

• Less face-to-face time and access to senior employers, bosses

🕵️‍♂️ Social Media Background-checks, with AI?

More and more recruiters are checking Social Media profiles during candidate screening (and so do job seekers with hiring managers). There’s a huge dilemma on whether this should be allowed (it is in the US) but it would still be very hard to regulate. It opens up a million additional sources of bias that aren’t supposed to be there, such as marital status, sexual orientation, and political beliefs, which aren’t relevant to a candidate’s ability to do a job or are illegal to ask about.

In the meantime, talent agencies are creating services to automate this process and use AI to give insights, summaries and more.

I had once stumbled upon Teza.ai - a small tool that promised to do a similar job for ‘thought leaders’, helping you know their interests, what they talked about, to find common ground or talking points. Unfortunately it seems the service has been shut (legal problems?) but I found a couple of screenshots that can give you an idea:

🎆 Decentralized Social Media is on the rise

May not look like a 100% future of work theme, but isn’t knowing about key trends one of the key skills needed to navigate an ever-changing world?

With the help of the ruckus that has been going on at Twitter, there’s been a lot of attention on people flocking web2 platforms for decentralized web3 Social Media.

The idea behind decentralized social media is to remove the middleman and create an ecosystem where users can:

• Own their content

• Own their social graph

• Own and control their data

• Use one profile for multiple apps (interoperability), and

• In Salil Shah’s words: “Build direct financial relationships with fans”

As you can see from the graph below, the main ones (Farcaster, Lens, Deso) are experiencing exponential growth but you can check out a full list here.

🎮 X-to-Earn: New Work Models

During the pandemic, and thanks to the boom of blockchain technology, we’ve seen the rise of new models of ‘X-to-Earn’. Play-to-earn (P2E) gaming took the world by storm in 2021, particularly in countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Venezuela, where gamers made $1.5k/mo. on average – more than their full-time salaries.

Some other applications have given birth to:

• Create-to-earn: Musicians and artists make money from the initial sale and resale of their works (in the form of NFTs) 

• Move-to-earn: Users are rewarded for physical activity (e.g., Sweatcoin for walking and Menzy for yoga and running)

• Wear-to-earn: Brands and designers pay customers who wear their virtual goods in the metaverse

Could this be just scratching the surface of new ways to work and to earn a living?

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