2024 Year In Review - Was The Job Market Really That Bad?

As 2024 quickly comes to an end, it's very obvious that we've had a very up and down and topsy-turvy labor market, and for those of us who have ridden out its entirety unscathed, you're probably in the minority. In this video, I want to take some time to recap the major themes that happened over the past 12 months in the job market, but before we get into that, if you're interested in more content just like this to keep you on top of what's happening in the labor market and how to approach your career with more conviction and authority, make sure you hit that subscribe button. You'll also want to hit that notification bell so you don't miss any future content. Ok, so let's talk about 2024. Oh my gosh, what a year we've had. There's been massive waves of layoffs, employment trends that just won't seem to stop, you've got employers acting badly, although let's face it, what's new there, and the job market keeps on evolving. So I want to take a look at the data so we can look at the macro trends and what has happened over the past 12 months in the job market, and maybe potentially it can give us some clues into what is going to happen in 2025. And while we're at it, let's look at some of the major trends that have come out of the market and where I think things might be shifting going forward. So without further ado, let's head in and take a look at the data. So we're going to start with the unemployment rate, and I'm pulling a lot of this data from Fred Economic Data, so this is actually the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which publishes a lot of really interesting employment data, and a lot of it's directly related to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So let's take a look at the past year. We started in January at 3.7%, and as you can see, we have steadily increased to a peak in July of 4.3%. So obviously, not the trend line that we want to be seeing. We've seen it slightly decrease, but then again, this is an uptick. I think they did some revisions of the numbers around November, and so we're starting to see that number creep back up again to this high. Now, if we want to look a little bit further out, let's take a look at the five-year snapshot, and how is this trending historically? So as we can see over the last five years, this is obviously going back to the beginning of the pandemic, where we can see historically, we were around 3.6%. And actually, if we even look beyond that, we can see that the unemployment rate had been steadily decreasing all the way until we hit the And obviously, we had a major jump up in unemployment as a result of everybody freaking out and laying people off. This is actually when I had my layoff in 2020. I started this channel. But then gradually, everybody went back to work. They were a hiring boom. Obviously, in 2022, 2021, this was like the heyday of the job seeker. And we kind of bottomed out around 3.4%, looks like in January of 2023, 3.4%. And ever since then, it's been gradually creeping back up. So let's put this into a little bit more context and look at the layoff rates. So let's head over and take a look at the last year's chart. So this is a look at seasonally adjusted total private layoffs and discharges, so people who were terminated, who were forcibly removed from their positions. Now, obviously, in January, we were looking at 1.5, and this is in the thousands. So 1.5 million is how I'm interpreting this. And it goes up to February, the trend line isn't going in the wrong direction, nearly 1.6 million people. Now, in January, I predicted that there would be less layoffs. And the first month, it was proving me incorrect. But things did reverse. And we looked at March and April as actually being pretty positive trend lines, where we went from 1.6 down to 1.45 million. And then it kind of just sideways for a bit. But unfortunately, from June onward, we've seen a relatively disturbing trend, where we peaked in September of 2024 at 1.72 million or 1.73 million. Now, positive news here is that it has decreased slightly. And again, we only have data through October on this particular chart. But we're seeing, again, some layoffs that have happened in November. If we were to look at going back just a little bit bigger snapshot, you can obviously see the data from 2020 really skews the chart. But you can see it's relatively flat through here. In fact, let me see if I can get rid of this to get a little bit more accurate reading. So we can see in January, we had a lot of this is the tail end of November 2020, a tail end of the pandemic. We saw a lot of layoffs. But then you can see the employment boom, where it went way down in June of 2021. And through a duration of 2021 into the first, maybe even second quarter of 2022. And this is where we saw the reversal of the job seeker market. And we saw it peak, the worst of it peak in January, February, probably first quarter of 2023. But it still hasn't been all that great. And if you actually look at September of 2024, we're nearly at the same levels as we were at the peak of everybody getting laid off in the second wave in 2023. So what I would say as far as the year is concerned, it hasn't been a stellar year for layoffs, although I would say it's not as bad as it was back in 2020. So how does the job market factor in during the same period of time over 2024? Well, let's take a look at open jobs. And here we look at the duration of 2020. We started off with, again, this is in the thousands. So 7.8, like nearly 8 million jobs, which is pretty flat going into as we finished October of last year. As we hit the first part of the year, things were relatively stable. But then we started seeing a very concerning trend of a continually decreasing number of job openings in the private sector, where, again, in September, which was a pretty rough month, we cratered to 6.5 million jobs. So from its peak in January of nearly 8 million down to 6.5 million. Now, good news is that it has rebounded slightly in October. But nonetheless, the trend line is not something that we really want to see heading into the end of this year. So if we again, let's look out a little bit further on the five year chart, and you can see the again, the 2020 just to put it in perspective, 2020 was a pretty topsy turvy year. And we we cratered at 4 million open jobs. And then you can see the employment boom, where at its peak, we had 11 million positions that were open. And ever since then, we've seen a steady decrease in the number of jobs are open. In fact, it's almost half of the number of jobs open, as it was at the peak in 2020, as it is today. Now, this is the Bureau of Labor Statistics for total job openings. Again, they're showing the exact same data, we can see it peaking in March around actually 12 million jobs. And this takes us all the way through again, October, we're at 7.7 million. So and the trend line is this is not positive. However, if you look historically back to 2009, you can see how things have been steadily growing all the way up until 2019. And then the pandemic hit, and we're still way above that. Although I believe this is my own thoughts. I believe that a lot of these numbers, the reason why there's so many more jobs now than there were back then, is that there's a lot of people who are underemployed during this period of time in 2020, where everything got shut down, they laid off a bunch of people, they actually replaced a lot of these roles with positions that had already been eliminated. So it's really not adding a new job to the economy, but rather just replacing a role that was already eliminated. And secondly, I think that they took a lot of these positions and split them into two or turned them into part time or they created kind of like lower level retail positions, etc. So a lot of these positions that were kind of high quality, they ended up splitting them into multiple roles. And I have some anecdotal evidence to support that where I've seen it happen, where a position gets eliminated, a company lays the role off, and then suddenly they repost the position as a lower level contract where it's paying half of what the previous role was. So for some of the roles that I knew people got laid off in my world. So as we dig deeper into the numbers, and I want you to keep in mind when we're looking at this chart, and hopefully you can see this because I know it's kind of small, but November 2023 and November 2024, we're looking at these two columns in particular. So the first column and the fourth column, as we start to scroll down through, keeping in mind that this is only looking at a month snapshot and not necessarily the entire year. But I want you to take a look at some of the data that's really telling between last year and this year at the same time. So in particular, what I find to be interesting is in this duration of employment, where we have less than five weeks of unemployment before somebody is off of unemployment and has found another job. We're seeing from again, November of last year till now, so 2.07 million to 2.2 million. So it's a slight increase there. So what that's telling me is people are getting back to work on less than five weeks, then from five weeks to 14 weeks. So this is getting into kind of intermediate levels of unemployment. It's relatively flat, but then as we look into 15 to 20 weeks or 15 to 26 weeks, we are seeing a certain increase from 931,000 people who are claiming unemployment to 1.23 million people. So there's definitely an increase there, roughly a 20% increase, maybe even 30% increase in the number of people who are starting to age in their unemployment. But where the number is particularly interesting is this 27 weeks and over we are seeing from 2021 is 1.2 million people had unemployment that potentially has run out. And then in this past month, 1.66 million. So a very significant increase in the number of people who have been on unemployment for a long time. So what that's telling me is that you're either getting a job really quickly and getting back to work, or you are on unemployment for so long that it is actually aging and probably losing your benefit coverage. So those are the two major buckets that I'm seeing. Everything else seems to be relatively unchanged. And I find that to be particularly interesting because I do know that there are some people who are on long-term unemployment and feeling very frustrated that nobody's hiring. The numbers suggest that you're not alone here. And this past year has actually been really difficult for people to get employed quickly. And in fact, more people are starting to age out of their unemployment and the benefits starting to expire. So you're not alone. You're not imagining things. This has been a very difficult year for people to get back to work quickly. Now, if we look at the tech market in particular, because as we know, the tech market has been hit really hard over the past couple of years, and the numbers certainly are continuing to support it. We can see as of December 26, 2024, that we are seeing a lot of people getting laid off this year. We started off the year really bad, 46,000 people getting laid off in the tech sector. And you can see how it decreased through March, but we saw a pretty disturbing uptick in August in particular, where it was nearly the same as it was in January. But as a little silver lining, if you could call it that, over the final quarter of 2024, we saw a drastic decrease in the number of tech layoffs. And I feel like tech is kind of at the tip of the spear. And so as tech goes, the rest of the economy goes. And we are seeing December is marketably lower. We've only got 2,900 people that have been impacted by layoffs, as opposed to starting off the year at 45,000. So it's been a pretty decent decrease, and it's a good trend. Now, if we look at the total number of layoffs in January, we had 222 companies announcing layoffs of various sizes, and in December, 39. And if we look at a little bit longer trend, we can see how 2024 is shaping up as the rest of the last five years since the pandemic. Now, obviously, you can see 2021 was a great time to be in the tech industry, but 2022 onward, not so much. Now, 2023 was particularly bad, and 2024 is shaping up to be a significantly better year than the previous. However, it is still pretty high as far as the total number of people that are laid off. And if you look at it, it's kind of on par with 2022 when things started happening. So where 2025 will lead us, who knows. But as of right now, 2024 certainly hasn't shaped up to be a very kind year for the employee, and in particular, in the tech industry. But another silver lining is that there are some companies in the tech space who are indeed hiring. And these are a lot of the same usual suspects who did a lot of layoffs. You can see Amazon over the past two years has laid off nearly 30,000 people in 25 separate layoff events, but they have 20,000 positions open. Now, I suspect that a lot of those are going to be in their warehouses for the seasonal holidays and that sort of thing. Plus, they have 1.5 million people working there. So obviously, 20,000 jobs is probably percentage-wise not that impressive. But we can also see that Apple, who laid off 835 people in separate, separate layoff events, actually has 4,713 openings. And we can see now Microsoft obviously has scaled back their hiring quite a bit, but they've laid off 16,000 people and they have 2,300 job openings. Same thing with Google. And Meta is still not really hiring all that much, 1,250. And they laid off quite a few people, 21,000. So not a great time to be in the tech space still, but there are some jobs to be had. Now, probably one that I would target would be Nvidia. They didn't have any layoffs over the past two years. They've been booming and they have some really coveted positions. I couldn't go through a review of 2024 without covering potentially the biggest labor movement over the past 12 months. And that of course is the forced return back to the office. So the war on remote work. And of course, Amazon leading the charge with this. And they made an announcement very infamously that they were forcing everybody to come back into the office five days a week. And that of course was met with quite a significant blowback, but their leadership team is not budging off of it. And they certainly have been forcing people and they have not been shy about laying people off who are not actively returning back to the office. We also have Starbucks, which has infamously forced a return to the office all while their CEO is still commuting from over a thousand miles away from their corporate offices. So it's a little bit of a do as I say, not as I do, but nonetheless, the corporate office is forcing people to return and it's not going over very well. I think they're actually dealing with a bunch of strikes at their coffee shop level or the retail level. And then of course we have Dell who has also made headlines by saying that if you don't return to the office, in other words, if you stay hybrid or remote, you can basically forget ever being promoted. And basically they're saying, come back to the office or else. And of course we've got Disney who has told their employees that they've got to return to the office as well. So pretty much everybody's jumping back on this trend. I think it probably has to do partially with there's office space that's sitting empty. They're paying a lot of money for it, but I think that they're trying to force this cultural issue and it's probably a way of forcing people out the door without laying them off. So probably make more content on that particular topic, but nonetheless, the trend has absolutely been in 2024. It's the year of returning to the office and hopefully we find some equilibrium there, but in a little bit of a surprise, this remote war, it actually seems like Americans in particular now prefer hybrid over fully remote work as according to at least some surveys. So they actually got some people who are increasingly desiring the human connection and Hey, listen, I've been working remotely for the last five or six, maybe seven years and I get it. You're sitting remotely. You don't have that connection. You don't have the camaraderie. You don't have the feeling like you're part of a team as much. And it's harder to put the computer down. It's hard to put the phone down. It's hard to put the email down. And so this is not entirely surprising. And in fact, I have been hearing a lot of people saying that they prefer hybrid over a strictly remote. And a lot of people who have built their lives around remote, and it's been a difficult transition to get back into the workplace. So that's 2024 in a nutshell. Hopefully you survived it relatively unscathed. Now make sure that you follow along on the channel because I'm going to give my predictions on what I think is going to happen in 2025. And it's shaping up to be just as topsy-turvy as the last year. And like always, if you're ready to start acting like the CEO of your career, make sure you check out my website, a life after layoff.com to learn how I appreciate you watching over the past year. And I look forward to bringing you another year of great employment content.