People have a lot of feelings about the economy, job market and state of work these days.
Employee confidence is near record lows while reviews mentioning “uncertainty” have skyrocketed since the November election and rollout of the Trump administration’s tariff policy, according to Glassdoor data.
To sum it all up into one word, “bad” is how Alison Green would put it.
“My mail is as depressing as it was in 2020, which was more depressing than in 2008” during the financial crisis, Green tells CNBC Make It.
Green, 51, is the writer behind Ask a Manager, a career column and website that she’s run since 2007. Millions of readers follow along for her advice on work quandaries big and small, from dealing with office jerks to quitting a toxic job.
Alison Green is the writer behind “Ask a Manager,” an online column and book about dealing with work issues big and small.
Courtesy of Alison Green
More recently, Green says the messages have become more panicked.
“There’s a real sense of potentially impending doom,” Green says. “People are very worried about whether their company will have to do layoffs, whether they will need to find another job, whether they will be able to leave if something happens that would normally make them want to look around.”
“It just it feels like a very scary job market to people,” she adds.
The biggest questions people are asking about work
These days, Green says the majority of the messages she gets now fall into one of three categories.
First, letter-writers, especially those in the federal government or nonprofit roles that rely on federal funding, are increasingly worried about their job security as the Trump administration continues to cut the size of the federal workforce.
They want to know whether it’s better to jump ship to somewhere “safer,” and how, exactly, to figure out whether a new opportunity is really more secure.
“It’s very hard to know, and no one has a crystal ball,” Green says candidly. “No one knows what things are going to look like six months or a year from now.”
Second, those who’ve been in their jobs for a long time are trying to piece together how the market and the hiring process have changed, in case they need to prepare to jump back in. Many also want advice on changing to a new field entirely, like moving from the public to the private sector.
A lot of people are in situations where there isn’t good advice.
Alison Green
Writer of ‘Ask a Manager’
Finally, Green says she hears from people who need help making the best of their bad job situations “because they hate their work, or their job or their boss is a nightmare, and they want to get away, and they’re feeling like, ‘Am I just stuck? And am I stuck forever?'”
The sour outlook can make it hard for Green to find the upside in her responses. “A lot of people are in situations where there isn’t good advice,” she says.
Advice for an uncertain job market
Green does her best to provide some positive takeaways, though.
For one, she urges people to remember that what happens to them in their careers or the job market isn’t a reflection of them. “They can still be someone who does excellent work,” she says. “What’s happening is happening because of external factors, not because of them.”
She also highlights that things can change very quickly. “Things might look very dire right now, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll look like that a year from now or two years from now,” she says.
Those figuring out their professional and financial life rafts should avoid “jumping to catastrophic thinking that ‘my career is over and I’ll never do the sort of work that I love again,'” Green says. That said, it’s a good time to shore up an adequate emergency savings fund. (Experts recommend three to six months of living expenses, but anything is better than nothing.)
To those actively in the job market, Green advises thinking broadly about how your skills transfer to other industries.
“You just need to get creative about it,” Green says. “I think not leaping to the assumption that ‘this is all I know how to do, and no employer will ever consider me a plausible candidate for another job,’ is very important.”
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