Young workers worry the most about job security, Financial Consciousness Index shows

One group of Australians is more stressed about holding down a job than others. But, experts have warned, they can improve their prospects by brushing up on the right skills.

More than a third of Aussie workers are worried about losing their job, with young people the most likely to fear for their future.

Changing workplace structures and underemployment were workers’ biggest worries, while technological change was only a concern for one in five people.

Almost half (43 per cent) of 18 to 25-year-olds worried about job security, a new Financial Consciousness Index by Deloitte and Compare the Market revealed.

This compared to 34 per cent of 55 to 64-year-olds, at the other end of the spectrum.

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Workers aged 18 to 25 are most likely to stress about job security. Picture: iStock

The Index found Australians’ fears about the ability to hold down a job typically stemmed from changing workplace structures, such as those leading to redundancies (39 per cent), or workers being in a temporary, casual or part-time position while trying to secure full-time hours (36 per cent).

About one in five (18 per cent) were also concerned by technological change.

Compare the Market general manager of banking Rod Attrill said concern about job security was valid but he expected effects caused by an uneasy economy to eventually plateau.

“A somewhat normal will return, I just don’t think we know right now what that normal is,” he said.

“The concern for the young people (graduating high school) is maybe five years ago when they started to select various subjects they needed to study, those subjects may not be as relevant in another five years’ time.”

Recent high school graduates must be ready to adapt to the new normal when it comes. Picture: iStock

Bond University law faculty executive dean Professor Nick James recommended school leavers planning to study law, for example, also brushed up on digital skills to ensure they were ready for change.

He said AI (artificial intelligence) was already having an “enormous” effect on industries such as legal services, with chat bots or lawyer bots answering simple legal questions.

“There are also more sophisticated AI tools being used by large law firms to analyse large quantities of legal documentation, such as contracts or court documents, so the sort of work that would have taken a team of young lawyers hundreds of hours to do can now be done by AI in just a few hours or a few minutes,” he said.

“Some lawyers are also using AI to analyse the decisions of judges to predict what a judge is likely to decide if a similar question comes up in a trial.”

Lawyer bots and data-driven trial predictions are changing the jobs available in the legal sector. Picture: iStock

Prof James said new technologies were “tightening up the range of work available in traditional law firms” but also creating new types of roles.

“(These will be for) someone with a law degree who also has got digital skills to help an organisation use the technology to come up with innovative solutions to problems,” he said.

“AI is unlikely to make professionals redundant but it will be an essential tool for use by professionals.”

Bond assistant professor Sven Brodmerkel, of the advertising faculty, said advertising agencies used AI for customer targeting as well as creative purposes.

He did not believe every advertising student should therefore study a double degree with IT, but predicted a need for more data scientists in the sector.

“Many of these tasks can be performed by machines but then are supervised and edited at the end (by people),” Mr Brodmerkel said.

“If a student says ‘I am really interested in the design aspects’, you need to make sure they do the basic principals but also a bit of Photo Shop and a little coding and data.”

Read more employment news in the Careers section of your Saturday newspaper.