The chief executive of the world’s largest asset manager says college graduates are not equipped with the skills needed to find jobs in the age of AI.
Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, Larry Fink says firms are still looking for fresh college graduates, but laments that young people are not skilled enough to catch up with the breakneck speed of AI disruption.
“What I’m worried about is this May, when college graduates are graduating, we may see the highest unemployment rate of that group of young men and women that we’ve seen in years without a recession. And so we need to be talking about it. We need to be thinking about it as a society. We need to be moving forward…
We don’t have enough skilled workers. There are so many job openings right now, and we’re hiring. We have a bunch of young men and women who have chosen the path of getting a college degree right now, where that disruption is occurring very rapidly. I try to tell everybody the future is today. It’s happening now…
So we’re still growing because the firm’s growing, but we’re not growing headcount as fast as we’re growing the enterprise. I think that’s what’s going on. We’re just starting the age of AI.”
Fink’s comments come as Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the Federal Open Market Committee is concerned about the “very, very low level” of job creation in the private sector. Speaking after the Fed held the interest rate steady, Powell says the labor market appears to be in an uncomfortable state of equilibrium.
“If you adjust what has been the trend job creation over the past, let’s say, six months, if you adjust that for what we think our staff thinks is the overstatement due to overcounting, effectively, there’s zero net job creation in the private sector.
But actually, that looks like that’s about what the economy needs in terms of dealing with very, very low non-existent growth in the labor force, which of course we’ve never had in our history. So you’ve got a zero-employment growth equilibrium. Now, that’s balance. But I would say it does have a feel of downside risk, and it’s not a really comfortable balance.”
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