Gen Z is inheriting a tough job market in Florida.
The state's unemployment is outpacing the national average. The candidate pool is flooded with graduates seeking similar work. And artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game for employers and job seekers alike.
Brenda Abrues, 21, graduated in May from the University of Central Florida with a degree in media production and management. She's two months into her job search with no luck.
"It's already difficult looking for a job as is," she said. "Now there's like, another layer of complexity," she said.
Despite changing her major multiple times to "avoid over-saturation of the market and how AI has impacted the industry," Abrues said it feels like everything is working against her in today's labor market.
A market flooded with similar degrees
Florida's unemployment rate was 4.8% in May, outpacing the national average for the fifth month in a row, according to the latest figures released by Florida Commerce.
Seven of the state's top 10 industries posted negative job growth in May compared to last year.
And while these signs point to a weaker economy for everybody in Florida, things can feel especially bad for recent college grads.
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"Some people have tried to make a big deal that this is a really tough market," he said. "Well, it is for college grads who are all looking for the same type of work," said Ron Hetrick, the principal economist at workforce intelligence firm Lightcast, in Jacksonville.
Graduates in fields like information systems, business and finance are saturating the market.
"So, we kind of keep pushing more people into a funnel where that funnel is not exiting out into jobs," he said.
AI isn't taking your job, but tokens might.
Hetrick said many companies are also choosing to invest in AI tokens — which are units of text, or data, that AI uses to break down and process language — rather than new hires.
"I think we've been really quick to say AI is costing jobs," said Hetrick. "And I don't think that's what we're seeing, especially right now."
However, companies changing investment strategies to buy AI tokens rather than hire for entry-level positions are certainly taking away opportunities from Gen Z job seekers.
Priya Dozier, who teaches business finance at the University of South Florida, said AI is changing how her students think about their careers.
"I think students are uncertain about what the future looks like with AI," she said. "There are all these headlines about AI taking away certain jobs or certain careers, and they're keenly focused on: if they choose something today, what will that look like in the future?”
She said she has noticed growing pressure among incoming undergraduate students to pursue "AI proof" degrees.
Meanwhile, many of her graduate students are returning to school to upskill their AI proficiency in a changing industry.
AI-friendly college coursework
Dozier, who previously worked for Fidelity Information Services in product development, said the influence of AI on the business finance sector is inevitable.
However, as she emphasizes in her teaching approach, students must be familiar with new technology that is industry standard without becoming over-reliant.
She tells her students: "Almost all of the things that you learn from a textbook, you can probably ask Alexa or some other device for it, but your ability to... learn and adapt... is what companies really want from you."
While she doesn't teach any AI courses offered by the USF Muma College of Business or Kate Tiedemann School of Finance, Dozier said she has introduced the technology into her lessons and allows students to use it for coursework with some guardrails.
"The line between what's human and what's tech is getting blurred, and I think that that is really, really interesting," she said. "I think it also creates more opportunities for us to separate ourselves more as humans."
Before graduating from UCF in the spring, Brenda Abrues said she was disappointed at the ways AI was bleeding into her curriculum in the arts and humanities college.
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“I have had professors add the usage of generative AI specifically as a requirement for assignments, which was — at least in my opinion — very counterintuitive to what my major was supposed to be," she said.
That's also what made her so angry on the day of her graduation, Abrues said. In a moment that went viral on social media, a corporate executive giving a UCF commencement speech was loudly booed on stage for praising AI.
Abrues said the speech felt especially tone deaf to a room full of arts and humanities students. It also felt like a flashpoint for how AI is changing every aspect of the job search, she said.
How AI is changing the job search
In addition to job expectations and college coursework, AI is also affecting companies' hiring practices.
Nationally, young workers without a degree are faring slightly worse than recent college grads, according to government data from May.
Young workers' unemployment rate is 7.2%, compared to recent grads at 5.6%.
But those newly graduated job seekers face higher unemployment than the national rate for all workers (4.3%), or all college grads combined (3.1%).
Among them, in March, was 26-year-old Tampa resident Isolina Llaguno. She was unemployed for nearly a month after being laid off from her job in immigrant child welfare following federal budget cuts.
While looking to switch fields into an administrative or customer service role, she said it felt like her applications rarely reached a human reviewer.
After submitting nearly 100 applications and dozens of automated, near-immediate rejections, she was convinced that employers were turning to AI to review resumes.
"And that's when I was like, oh, okay... let me see if I can kind of beat the system a little bit, and also use AI against AI to try to surpass their initial screenings, or whatever," she said.
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Even though she had transferable skills, Llaguno said it was difficult to convince an algorithm of that.
"Companies are using AI, and it's kind of unfair... because you know you're doing your due diligence by applying, by searching, tweaking your resume, but then nobody ever sees it," she said.
For some Gen Z job seekers, like Brenda Abrues, the solution is to steer clear of companies relying on AI altogether.
As an aspiring digital creator, she said she would rather volunteer or work as an independent contractor than align with a company whose values she doesn't share on AI.
“I keep seeing more and more logos that I can tell are generated by AI… which begs the question: are you looking for somebody who can just get things out quickly, so you can make more money, or are you actually here to create quality content?”
Gabriella Paul covers the stories of people living paycheck to paycheck in the greater Tampa Bay region for WUSF. Here’s how you can share your story with her.
