Cathie Wood has urgent advice for struggling job seekers | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

If you’re looking for a job in 2025, odds are you’re probably feeling the same frustration that millions of other job hunters are grappling with right now.

With seemingly endless waves of layoffs in tech and other key spaces over the last few years, many job hunters are trying the same techniques that have worked for them in the past, only to come up empty-handed.

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Between the push to replace human workers with AI and people using AI tools to glut applications systems, reporting has begun to emerge this year about how the state of hiring has become a complete mess.

It can be a scary situation to be in — especially if you’re one of nearly 50% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, per data from a 2024 Bank of America survey.

It’s overwhelming to know where to turn next in such a situation, but there are some experts that are weighing in with good advice, and now another one of them has spoken up with some wise words.

Arkk Invest CEO Cathie Wood has a bold take on what job seekers need to do to survive.

Image source&colon; Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Cathie Wood addresses the job crisis

Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest (ARKK) and well-known Tesla investor, recently took to her company’s social media platform to talk about the issue of the job market.

“The Wall Street Journal published an article about college graduates having a difficult time getting jobs,” Wood said in a post on the Ark Invest official X account shared on June 16.

“And we do know that AI is certainly hurting entry-level jobs,” she continued, bringing up an issue currently being reported on by major news outlets. Job listings for entry roles have declined by 15%, while applications per job have jumped 30%, per data from career platform Handshake.

“If you look at the statistics, what you’ll find is that the unemployment rate is up,” Wood continued. “I think the low, the recent low in that metric, was 4%. And we’re up above 6%, 6.3 or 6.4%, I think.”

Wood turned the topic to the focus of her comments: the shift in the working world toward artificial intelligence tools.

“So the lesson here, [to] anyone who is thinking about changing a job or looking for a job, is start focusing on AI. There’s a lot you can do yourselves and this metric, the labor differential, says it’s getting harder to find a job.”

Wood went on to provide more data to support her point.

“The other metric that suggests that is continuing unemployment claims,” she said. “They have been rising, even while initial claims have been pretty stable. And what that suggests is that people who have been out of work are finding it difficult to get a job.”

The move toward AI

Several major tech companies this year have not been bashful about announcing their intentions to replace human workers with AI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that AI would shrink Amazon’s workforce in the coming years.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in a memo that was sent out to Amazon employees.

“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

Microsoft has also done multiple rounds of layoffs this year, while stating that it intends to spend $80 billion on the construction of AI-enabled data centers.

Ex-Google exec and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton also commented on AI taking jobs during an interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast on June 16.

“For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody,” he said.