How the Coronavirus Outbreak Will Affect Your Job Search

The coronavirus pandemic has tightly gripped the whole world in its claws, bringing about life-changing consequences almost overnight. While the corona scare has succeeded in threatening people the world over, there are a few sections of the society that have been the worst affected. The job-seekers, for example.Where the corona scare is keeping businesses shut down and people shut in at homes, those who’ve lost their jobs are finding it extremely difficult to cope up.

How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has Affected Job Search Internationally?

According to a report by The Economic Policy Institute, the virus outbreak is likely to remove 3 million jobs in the US by summer. Furthermore, the UN prediction presents an equally grim picture. The international body fears at least 25 million jobs getting eradicated all over the world.

The reason – most businesses have closed down, resulting in massive loss of revenue. The problem aggravates because we don’t know yet until when the situation would last. The longer these businesses keep shut, the employees are uncertain of their futures at their jobs. To worsen the problem, a large number of organisations the world over have laid off their employees, again owing to revenue loss.

In such a situation, these poor employees are standing at crucial crossroads, not knowing what to do or where to go. Considering the highly uncertain global situation, adding to it the equally ugly job market at the moment, lots of job seekers are low on hope. And it’s not entirely baseless either. Employees are being laid off, jobs are uncertain (because of uncertainty over businesses reopening) and even if jobs are there, searching for a job is daunting.

There’s little or no room for salary negotiations. This means that even if there are few new jobs on offer, candidates may just have to be content with what’s on offer. Besides, underemployment is also likely to considerably increase amid the coronavirus outbreak. With businesses having closed down, lots of employees working from home find it difficult to get enough work to sustain both themselves and generate enough revenue for the company too.

How a Prolonged Shutdown Might Affect the Job Market

We’ve evaluated above the corona impact on job search since the pandemic broke out. Now imagine if this entire situation were to prolong for a while more – 15 days, a month, a few months, a year? It’s hard and scary both to imagine so. Put it this way. All of the above ramifications we’ve discussed so far multiplied by two! This is how this virus is going to have game-changing effects on the global economy, particularly the job sector.

If business organisations continue to remain shut for a prolonged period, more lay-offs may hit employees, for revenue loss. These job seekers may not find enough jobs too for there won’t be just enough work left in the market for long. Underemployment may continue to be on the rise as well.

We can only adopt a wait-and-watch policy for now and hope for things to get better, well, soon.