job

The problem is not that middle managers are retiring en masse. Generation Z doesn’t want their job.

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The inverted population pyramid that we have in Spain means that hundreds of thousands of professionals with decades of experience behind them retire every year. Area directors, zone managers, team leaders and other intermediate and management positions that have sustained the structures for decades. The problem is not their exit, which should be a normal and expected process, the real challenge for companies is that now no one wants to take your place. The situation even has a technical name “succession crisis” and the data confirm it. According to data collected in the report ‘Human value: global trends on the future of work‘ Prepared by Manpower Group, 57% of companies globally recognize that their aging workforce is already affecting their human resources strategy. Key management positions are retiring and Generation Z does not seem willing to fill them. Reasons are not lacking. Retirements skyrocket. The first to reach retirement age have been the generation of baby boomersbut the first members of generation Only in Spain, in 2024 they registered 368,065 new retirements, 12.6% more than the previous year, while the 345,000 retirements registered in 2025 show a sustained rhythm for the following years. As pointed out to ExpansionAccording to Óscar Berumen, CEO of Grupo Viraal, what is lost with these departures is not just a vacant position: “When a company lets these profiles go, it loses technical knowledge, strategic memory and a deep way of understanding the business.” It is a type of knowledge that is not contracted with a typical job offer. Generation Z is very clear that they do not want to ascend. The phenomenon even has a name: conscious unbossingor the total disengagement from decision-making positions that generation Z is putting into practice. According to a survey From recruiting firm Robert Walters, 52% of Gen Z professionals actively avoid middle management positions throughout their career. 69% describe them as roles in which a high level of stress is required, in exchange for low financial reward. In other words, the salary improvement that companies offer does not compensate for the additional mental load that promotion entails, which is why young people from Generation Z are not willing to give up mental health or reconciling their personal life. According to the latest data for 2024 from the INEthe average salary of those under 25 years of age in Spain was 1,372.8 euros. Take on more responsibilities without real compensationGraphic is not the most attractive proposal, which is why many young people prefer to fulfill their current positions and maintain conditions compatible with their personal life. AI accelerates the problem from another side. As if the refusal to promote was not enough, the emergence of AI in the workplace has added another reason to stay away from promotions. According the data collected by Revelio Labs for Business Insiderjob offers for middle managers in the US were 42% lower than the maximum recorded in April 2022. The consulting firm Gartner calculated that by 2026 one in five companies will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions. The last ones layoffs in big technology such as Amazon, Google or Meta have not occurred in a context of financial crisis, but have been carried out with the intention of flattening internal structures. This flattening has especially affected to middle management who were dedicated to transferring the objectives to the rest of the staff and managing their execution. Now that job AI is going to automate itwhich is why young people do not want to play those roles and put a target on their back in the next round of layoffs. A perfect storm. According to estimates of the report According to ManPower Group, by 2030, more than one in four workers in advanced economies will be over 55 years old. Generation Among millennials, that figure rises somewhat more, to 56%, but it is still a minority. Companies that operate with structures designed for linear upward trajectories face the major problem that that model no longer fits the way young people understand work today. The gap left by boomers and generation X will not disappear just because of the passage of time. Organizations will have to decide whether to redesign the role of middle managers to make it attractive again, or they learn to function without them. In Xataka | Finding a job had always been a good way to escape poverty: in Spain it is no longer true Image | Unsplash (tommao wang)

If you are very good at your job and your boss sends you more tasks than the rest, share this article

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Being the most committed employee in the office has a serious health risk: the more someone enjoys their job, the more trouble they end up making. things that don’t belongwhich are not going to add to your career and which, over time, can end up burning him. At least that’s what he claims an investigation from Cornell University and Northeastern University in which 4,300 employees from different sectors have participated. As and as he declared Sangah Bae, one of its main researchers, Northeastern Global News, This study was born from his own experience as a junior analyst in Chicago: the more involved he became, the more extra work fell on him. Years later, data confirm that this pattern was no coincidence. It’s not a coincidence: it’s a pattern. The researchers found that managers tend to assign additional tasks to employees who perceive as more motivated. In a field survey with 834 middle managers, 55% chose the employee they considered most motivated to assign extra tasks, even when the managers had data on variables such as age, experience or work performance, the perception of the employee’s motivation prevailed in their choice. The laboratory experiment was even more revealing since the researchers designed groups of three people in which one played the role of manager and the other two as employees, competing for a financial bonus linked to their performance. In this scenario, 74% of those acting as managers assigned the extra task to the most motivated employee, even though they knew that this hurt their chances of collecting that bonus. As a result, only about 31.37% of the most motivated employees ended up receiving an extra bonus for their performance improvement. Motivational oversimplification. According to the study According to Bae and Woolley, behind this tendency is a specific psychological mechanism that researchers have called “motivational oversimplification.” The manager’s reasoning is based on the fact that, if this employee enjoys his main job, he will probably also enjoy any extra task equally, even if it has nothing to do with what he usually does and is monotonous and routine tasks that they do not contribute anything. The researchers say that managers “can assume that employees who enjoy their main job will also enjoy additional tasks and that this enjoyment will protect them from burnout.” That is, if it is assumed that the employee will enjoy the task, it is assumed that it will not cost him that much to do it. The study data quantifies this perception gap: managers estimated a drop of just 0.2 points in the motivated employee’s job satisfaction when assigned extra work, while affected employees reported a drop of a full point on that same scale. When motivation turns against you. In one of the study tests carried out over a period of six days, managers chose the most motivated employee 69% of the time, which is equivalent to an average of 4.2 out of every 6 extra tasks assigned. This assignment pattern was repeated every day, which suggests that managers generate systematic inequality in the workload within their teams without being aware of it. “When managers have to assign extra work to their employees, they opt for the easiest option: a person they can trust. That employee who is your shortcut, that person you turn to regularly, who seems to be engaged and enjoy their work, could actually be silently suffering burnout,” Bae said. …and the motivation runs out. As revealed the study OSH Pulse 2025 of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), 44% of EU workers are regularly exposed to task overload. In Spain, this percentage reaches 49%, and one in three European workers (29%) acknowledges having suffered stress, depression or anxiety caused or aggravated directly by their work in the last twelve months. In Spain, the number of employees affected by task overload rises to 40%. As and how they stand out in Harvard Business Reviewthe study by Cornell and Northeastern Universities adds a new variable that these occupational health data do not include: this burden is not distributed randomly among all employees of a company, but rather tends to concentrate precisely on the employees who are most involved.

There is a booming job in the era of artificial intelligence: cybersecurity expert

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Yeah Mythosfrom Anthropic, and GPT-5.4-Cyber, from OpenAI, have been presented as models capable of detecting and exploiting vulnerabilities, the quick conclusion seems quite evident: cybersecurity profiles could begin to become redundant. After all, we are talking about models aimed at moving in one of the most delicate areas of technology: finding flaws before others take advantage of them. The answer, at least for now, goes in the opposite direction to that first intuition. AI is not making the expert irrelevant. On the contrary: today it is more necessary than ever. That signal is already beginning to be noticed clearly in the United States, where the NYT has put figures and testimonies to a trend that was gaining strength: the hiring of cybersecurity profiles. The American newspaper points out that offers in the sector grew by 11% year-on-year in the first quarter, according to Glassdoorand shows how some executive search firms are receiving more assignments to find managers with experience in security breaches, data protection and code review. The reason is not just to protect data. There is also a need to respond to incidents and understand how AI changes the risk surface of companies. The key is that this new layer of AI not only changes the tools of those who protect the systems. It also modifies the possibilities of those who try to compromise them. Reuters pointed out a few days ago that Attackers are increasingly using AI to detect vulnerabilities, and Check Point has warned in its 2026 Cybersecurity Report that AI attacks have moved from the experimental phase to a routine criminal deployment. More tools do not mean fewer cybersecurity experts The market, furthermore, is not asking for exactly the same thing as it did a few years ago. Cybersecurity continues to be the umbrella, but more specific capabilities are beginning to weigh heavily within it: AI, cloud security, engineering, analysis and risk assessment. The 2025 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study points out that hiring managers place AI among the most in-demand skills, with 27%, and professionals raised that perception to 44%. The conclusion is important: knowing about security is not enough. It is becoming increasingly important to understand how this security is integrated into complex systems obviously crossed by AI. Fortinet did a survey and found that 49% of respondents fear that AI will increase cyberattackswhile 97% of organizations already use or plan to use a cybersecurity solution that takes advantage of this technology. So it seems that companies are not only concerned about the offensive use of AI, they are also trying to incorporate it into their own defenses. And that opens up another less visible, but equally important, need: having teams capable of evaluating these tools and integrating them judiciously. In Spain, photography also points to a sector in full expansion. INCIBE summarizes it with a very useful phrase to ground the phenomenon: “Cybersecurity is already one of the most dynamic sectors of the Spanish digital economy.” According to the study on the cybersecurity industry in Spain 2025the organization places employment at 164,761 people and points out that cybersecurity already represents 25.55% of employment in the ICT sector. The forecast, furthermore, does not speak of a specific increase: between 2026 and 2029, the sector will grow at an annual rate of 14.25%, until reaching 282,157 jobs at the end of that period. “Cybersecurity is already one of the most dynamic sectors of the Spanish digital economy.” The problem is that this growth comes with an obvious tension: there are not always enough profiles prepared to cover what companies need. Deloitte formulates it from the side of those responsible for security: “Nearly 38% of CISOs identify reliance on scarce profiles as a significant challenge, reflecting a persistent gap between growing demand for capabilities and limited market supply.” The consequence is that many organizations end up relying on external talent to support your defenses. In fact, Deloitte points out that in 2026, 60% of cybersecurity personnel will be external. Seen from Spain, the phenomenon shares the same background, although with its own nuances. The United States remains one of the epicenters of the AI ​​industry and we cannot understand this trend without looking at what is happening there, but it is also not advisable to extrapolate its market dynamics as if they were identical to those of Europe. Other indicators come into play here: employment growth, relevant weight within the ICT sector and dependence on external profiles in many organizations. The conclusion, however, points in the same direction on both sides of the Atlantic: AI is forcing cybersecurity capabilities to be strengthened, not reduced. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | How often should we change ALL our passwords according to three cybersecurity experts

When asked “how much do you expect to earn” in a job interview, Bill Gates gives the definitive advice to get it right

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It doesn’t matter how much you have prepared for a job interview or whether you have an impressive resume, because when push comes to shove, in that face-to-face job interview, it is quite common for us to have our nerves on edge. Because beyond meeting the requirements, that first impression matters a lot. Furthermore, the job interview is a minefield full of trick questions where a false step can be very costly. Given that there are questions that hide more than what they say, you move along a fine line in which you have to try to answer honestly, bet on diplomacy and at the same time extract information and leave no room for doubt to get the job but not at any price. If there is a thorny question, it is ‘How much do you expect to earn?‘. Well, a person as influential and experienced as Bill Gates has a recommendation so as not to get the answer wrong. This is how Bill Gates gets out of the quagmire of ‘How much do you expect to earn?’ If you are asked about your salary expectations, the scenario is the following: if you say a value above what the company has programmed, you may be left out of the selection process, but if your proposal is too low, it may also happen that you get a job with a salary lower than what you would like and that at the same time sounds like underestimating the value of your work and experience. But Bill Gates has been there before and is clear about what to respond. And not just now, but it was in 2020 when the tycoon and billionaire behind Microsoft offers a way out of that thorny issue. More specifically in one of the interviews from the ‘State of Inspiration’ serieswhich pitted Gates face to face with basketball star Stephen Curry. For Bill Gates, the best response to not closing doors and looking good is not to offer an exact figure and to focus on the future, diverting attention from salary to long-term value. I hope the options package is good. I can take risks and I think the company has a great future, so I prefer to get stock options even over cash compensation. I’ve heard other companies are paying too much, but treat me fairly and strengthen the options. This is the move proposed by the tycoon, since in this way you reflect, on the one hand, your confidence in the company’s future project and, on the other, how you want to contribute to its success by applying your skills, so that the chances of achieving the contract are increased. This should soon stop being a problem. However, it is worth remembering that on June 7, 2026 comes into force the European Remuneration Transparency Directive (EU 2023/970). This is a salary transparency law by which companies are obliged to report the salary before the first interview. Therefore, although Gates’ advice may be useful for companies that break the law, or when you are interviewing at a startup that is not European, in theory within Europe we will soon no longer need to go around to get an idea about the salary we are going to receive. In Xataka | Bill Gates has been talking about AI for years. Now he thinks we are making the same mistake as with the arrival of computers Cover | Editing by Rubén Andrés (Unsplash (Arif Riyanto), Flickr (The Aspen Institute)) Via | The Economist

Suddenly, all the papers students hand in at universities look like the same job. There is a suspect

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AI has caused an earthquake in the education sector. Students use it (many times indiscriminately) and teachers try to adapt to the change reinventing homework and exams. As the years go by, its use becomes normalized and the effects are already beginning to be seen. One of them is that all students They’re starting to sound the same. When AI gives its opinion for you. They tell it in cnn. AI chatbots have become another everyday tool in university life, but it is not only that they are used as support to write a paper, there are more and more students who turn to AI for everything, even to know what to say in class. They tell the case of a Yale student who admits that during a class debate “the conversation stopped, I looked to my left and saw someone frantically typing on their laptop.” He was asking a chatbot the same question his teacher had just asked. I myself am doing a university master’s degree and the situation is not strange to me. There are many students who turn to a chatbot to answer questions that are precisely looking for a critical and personal answer. Homogeneous thinking. It is one of the consequences that are being seen as a result of the use of AI chatbots. According to a study published in March of this yearLLMs narrow the diversity of human expression in three dimensions: language, perspective, and reasoning strategies. The reason is that training data contains bias cultures and overrepresented positions. The authors of the study claim that AI models tend to reproduce Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic points of view. In a context like the university, the result is that the students’ language is generally more polished, but the responses and reasoning are similar and ends up eroding the diversity of opinions. Hallucinations. These biases in the training data also partly explain the phenomena of hallucinations and flattery. When an LLM invents an answer or agrees with us even if we are wrong, it has to do with the fact that Positive and accommodating interactions prevail in your training data. That is to say, his training tells him that it is more important to give an answer rather than its truthfulness. Cognitive surrender. It is a concept taken from an experiment we talked about recently and refers to the phenomenon whereby we stop thinking and checking for ourselves when using AI, accepting its answers with little or no critical review and adopting its security as if it were our own. Delegating part of the cognitive process to AI is not a bad thing if it is done with a critical vision, the problem is when it is done indiscriminately and without any scrutiny of the answers. AI is making us dumb. A MIT study from 2025 pointed in this direction, but we already saw that It’s a very simplistic statement. of what is happening. Whether AI makes us lazier and impairs our critical thinking depends on how we use it. It would be comparable to using a calculator to do a very complex operation or using it to multiply five by six. Well used, AI can save us a lot of time and can be a very powerful tool to shape complex ideas, always without losing that critical thinking. Critical thinking is learned. This is the real problem of the indiscriminate use of AI in the educational environment. We are talking about people who have not yet developed this skill and who are delegating reasoning to an external tool may cause them to never learn it. In front of the prohibitionist stancevarious authors have pointed out the urgency of starting conversations with students from early stages to teach them to use AI critically and responsibly. Image | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | A university used an AI to hunt down students who used AI. The result was a predictable disaster

more job offers but it is more difficult to find work

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The technology sector has never had so many open vacancies and yet finding a job there has become a task harder than ever. This apparent contradiction is not just a feeling: the data confirms it, and it has everything to do with how AI is redrawing the map of who has a place and who does not in technology companies. A detailed analysis by Lenny Rachitsky, expert in the technological labor market and host of the popular Lenny’s Podcastoffers an image that invites reflection. The figures are the most optimistic that has been recorded in its four editions of the report on the state of employment in the technological product sector, but the reality of many professionals who looking for a new job contradicts that optimism on paper. Numbers are deceiving (or at least, they don’t tell everything). According to the collected data by Rachitsky through TrueUp, a platform that tracks job offers in more than 9,000 technology companies in the world, there are more than 7,300 vacancies open for profiles Product Manager At a global level, 75% above that recorded at the beginning of 2023 and almost 20% more than at the beginning of this same year. In engineering, the figure is even more striking, with more than 67,000 active offers worldwide and 26,000 in the US alone. However, more vacancies do not automatically equal easier finding a job. Rachitsky himself acknowledges in his report that there are many people having a hard time searching, and that this does not change because the overall numbers are good. He labor market growsYes, but it doesn’t do it at the same rate for everyone. not even for all profiles. The boom in roles linked to AI. The great catalyst for this growth is AI. Jobs related to its development and implementation are skyrocketing compared to other technology roles, something Rachitsky describes as a hockey stick-shaped growth curve. This profile demand of software engineering reaches both native AI companies (such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Cursor) and non-technology companies, which looking for product managers specialized in integrating these technologies into their processes. a report of the London School of Economics confirms that more than 76% of product managers expect to expand their investment in AI in 2026, which has triggered demand for managers capable of translating the capabilities of AI models into concrete products. The profile that companies are looking for, however, is very specific and not just any candidate with AI on the resume is worth it, but experienced professionals in implementation and with the ability to make decisions in environments where AI is already part of the development process. Side B: junior profiles are left out. This is where the other side of the paradox comes in. The report by Anthropic ‘Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence’reveals that overall unemployment among workers most exposed to AI has not increased significantly since the arrival of ChatGPT, but there is a worrying sign in the data from hiring the youngest. Specifically, the study detects that, since 2024, workers between 22 and 25 years old have increasingly less likely to be hired in jobs most exposed to automation. The incorporation rate for these positions has fallen approximately half a percentage point, reducing by up to 14% the probability that a young man finds a job in those occupations, relative to levels prior to the launch of ChatGPT. For workers over 25 years of age, however, that same drop is not observed. Design, the great forgotten of the recovery. There is another profile that the recovery of employment in the technological labor market seems to have left aside: the design one. While product and engineering roles have been growing for two years, vacancies for designers have practically stagnated since the beginning of 2023, with around 5,700 global offers compared to more than 7,300 for product. The analysis firm Humbl Design confirms in its January 2026 report that design roles oriented toward routine execution will barely grow between 2% and 3% until 2034, while profiles specialized in strategy and problem solving project an increase of 16% in the same period. AI has a lot to do with this stagnation. Its ability to accelerate the work of engineers has reduced dependence on traditional design processes, especially in the prototyping and generation of visual variants phases. That is, AI has assumed that role and is now executed from the development departments, so companies They don’t need so many designers anymore.. In Xataka | “The world is in danger”: Anthropic’s security manager leaves the company to write poetry Image | Unsplash (Mimi Thian)

Spain has been looking for a way to make mass tourism more digestible for years. The US threatens to do the job for her

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In 2025, Spain was left with the desire to reach the 100 million tourists foreigners. Now a cloud on the other side of the Atlantic threatens to move that milestone further away also in 2026. In a turbulent scenario, conditioned by the warthe brent barrel climbing and domestic politics, more and more Americans are rethinking their trips abroad. This is suggested by at least one report from the consulting firm Cirium, which has detected a “puncture” both in flight reservations between Europe and the US and (and here is the key) from the US to Europe. The data is relevant because the flow of Americans connects with other fronts that affect Spain, such as the demand of the tourism sector or the housing. A percentage: 11.2%. The data has advanced it USA Today. In a chronicle on tourism and international travel patterns, the newspaper slips a couple of data from the consulting firm Cirium that leave a clear reading: the demand for transatlantic flights is suffering. And quite obviously. According to their analysis, reservations from Europe to the United States have experienced a year-on-year decrease (July 2025-July 2026) of 15.34%. In the opposite direction, from the United States to Europe, a drop of 11.19% has also been recorded. Country of origin Tourists (2025) AVERAGE expenditure per tourist € (2025) United Kingdom 19,084,423 1,240 France 12,767,491 908 Germany 12,050,833 1,317 Italy 5,704,989 956 Netherlands 5,007,641 1,423 USA 4,456,665 2,297 Portugal 3,383,482 602 The alarms go off. The falls are striking, but they are even more shocking when compared to measurements that the consultancy managed at the beginning of the year. The outlook they drew at that time was also negative and predicted falls, but not so abrupt. Europe-US reserves pointed to a decline of 14.22% and US-Europe reserves of 7.27%. The reading is clear: travel forecasts have worsened, especially those of Americans. Why is it important? That the US has lost appeal among foreign tourists is no surprise. In 2025, after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the trade and immigration war with which his mandate began, there began to be talk of a tourist boycott to the country of the stars and stripes. In 2026 the outlook is not simple either. The US has the powerful claim of the World Cup (it is the host along with Mexico and Canada), but the year has still started losing travelers and Oxford Economics estimates that, despite the ‘FIFA effect’, 2026 will close with a discreet growth tourism of 3.9%. What is striking about Cirium’s analysis is that the flow of tourists does not seem to be suffering only in the ‘USA direction’. Demand also pushes in the opposite direction, from Americans themselves, who are less interested in crossing the pond to visit Europe. USA Today cites two cases: reservations to Frankfurt have been reduced by 26.8% and those to London by 11.31%. Half surprise. The truth is that Cirium’s data only confirms the forecasts released several months ago by YouGov, which in December published a study in which he already warned that Americans would face their international vacations with some “caution” in 2026. The report left out some percentages for reflection. For example, 60% of those surveyed admitted that they never traveled abroad for pleasure, something that is largely explained by the cost of flying. Another interesting fact is that 43% admit to having traveled less abroad during the last year. But… And why is that? There is no single answer. When talking about the decline in demand in December, YouGov slid two factors why Americans pack less now. First, due to “economic uncertainty”, a reason cited by almost a third (28%) of those surveyed. Second, due to the increased cost of travel, something that 18% complained about. Since then the picture has become more complex. Added to the uncertainty are geopolitical tensions and the conflict in the Middle East, which, remember USA Todaybeyond the rise in oil prices, has “revived fears of terrorism.” The newspaper recalls that messages like the one left not long ago by Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security, about the security risks derived from the war in Iran weigh on US travelers. There would be another factor influencing Americans’ flight plans. The prolonged government shutdown from the end of 2025 has increased the burden on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which partly translates into long lines at the country’s airports. Now we add the changes to the airport map caused by the war in Iran, the foreseeable increase in the cost of transportation and flight cancellation due to increased costs. Does Spain care? Yes. The US is not only a world power. It also represents an important fishing ground for tourists and expats interested in spending time in our country. According to data from the INE, last year Spain received 96.8 million of foreign visitors. Of them some 4.4 million (almost 5%) came from the US, making it one of the main foreign markets. Its average expenditure per person is also high: 2,297 euros in 2025, above the average (1,392) and nations like Germany. Its weight is relevant if Spain wants to reach the goal of 100 million visitors. It is also felt in another market closely connected to tourism: housing. Both through vacation rentals and the expatswhich in recent years have set their sights on the European market due to their attractiveness. In fact there are experts who they already warn that there are areas like Mallorca that are arousing more and more appetite among Americans looking for luxury homes. Image | Martijn Vonk (Unsplash) In Xataka | China stripped Japan of its tourists in hopes of causing an economic hole. Nothing could be further from reality

The price of electricity, the cold and the fear of a blackout have brought a 19th century job back to London: chimney sweeps

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When you hear about chimney sweeps, the image that comes to mind is that of men (or boys) from the late 19th century with smudged faces, shirts full of soot and a large broom on their shoulders. That’s the topic. The photographs that Google shows when we search for the word and the one it illustrates your entry on Wikipedia. Today the reality is very different. In the middle of 2026, not only are there still professionals dedicated to the trade, but they use cutting-edge technology and in cities like London they are experimenting a resurgence thanks to the price of energy. His appearance is nothing like that of the famous Bert de ‘Mary Poppins’but they continue to play a key role… and above all they are in demand. Chimney sweeps in 2026? Exact. And at least in London they are not an extemporaneous and decadent group, the memory of a bygone era. On the contrary. As I counted a few days ago The New York Times The profession is still very much alive there, it has been able to adapt to the needs (and resources) of the 21st century and above all it is experiencing a resurgence thanks to the cost of energy. The clearest proof is left by National Chimney Sweeps Association (NACS, for its acronym in English): in 2021 it had 590 members, today its membership base is already around 750. The union includes dozens of women and some businesses claim that in winter they receive between 70 and 80 calls a day. What do they do? Essentially the same as its predecessors from the 19th and 20th centuries, although in a very different context and with very different resources. To remove soot from chimneys they still use brushes that Bert from ‘Mary Popins’ would perfectly recognize, but that is only part of an arsenal that also includes digital cameras, industrial vacuum cleaners and smoke detection equipment. “Almost like chimney technicians,” points out Martin Glynnfrom NACS. Companies are even using drones to scan rooftops. Nothing to do with the habits that once made the profession infamous, such as employing orphans to climb chimneys and clean ducts. It sounds like terrifying science fiction, but this practice was common in the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact in 1875 the death of a child that got stuck in Fulbourn generated such a stir that the Government approved a law that banned “climbing children.” Are there still chimneys? Yes. British chimney sweeps were not immune to key changes, such as the popularization of central heating in the second half of the 20th century or the Clean Air Act (‘Clean Air Act‘) of 1956, but the union has been able to endure and today lives in a much kinder time, even one of vindication. I told it just a year ago in The Telegraph Steven Pearce, descendant of a long line of chimney sweeps who started in the trade decades ago, convinced that the profession’s days were numbered. “At first I only accepted it as a weekend job because we thought the trade would disappear with the 1956 law, when the Government gave local authorities the power to control the burning of coal and boiler fumes,” Pearce relates. “But that didn’t happen, in fact the last five years have been better than ever in business. It’s the busiest time I’ve seen in 45 years.” He is not the only one which confirms the rebirth of the profession. What is the reason? In 2026 English homes may not rely on coal and wood for heat, but they will still light their fireplaces. And not only because of the popularization of stoves. NACS itself admits that demand for its services has been driven by two factors: the increase in energy prices of recent years and a turbulent international context, in which the electricity supply seems a vulnerable flank to enemy attacks. The group also remembers that people simply “like to sit in front of a fireplace” to read, have a glass of wine, watch a movie and unwind. As if that were not enough, a good fire also helps reduce dependence and expense on central heating. What does the regulations say? Of course there are restrictions on the domestic use of coal, but The New York Times remember that even in areas like London the burning of authorized fuels They emit very little visible smoke. What they do generate is soot, which explains why the Government advises that chimneys be cleaned every year with professional help. “People think: ‘We’re going to have a plan B, a fireplace, a stove in case the power goes out,’” Glynn adds.president of NACS. “If you have the option of burning wood or smokeless fuel you can still cook and have some heating. There is a big increase in demand, people are lighting fireplaces again.” How does the future look? Steven Pearce assures that his clients continue buying stoves and admits that it is difficult for him to believe that people are going to do without the installations, even if they are prohibited. “I can’t imagine those who have spent £3,000 to £5,000 installing them not using them.” In fact, he maintains that in recent years he has seen “a great resurgence in the purchase of multi-fuel fireplaces and stoves, which burn wood, charcoal and smokeless materials.” It’s not all advantages: your ‘bill’ is PM2.5 emissionparticles invisible to the naked eye but which do represent a harmful “air pollutant”. Images | Wikipedia, Jorbasa Fotografie (Flickr) and NACS In Xataka | While the whole world looks at oil, Venezuela’s true treasure is hidden in the basements of London: its gold

Getting a manicure while she was on sick leave almost cost her her job. He was saved by a detective who didn’t know how to do his job.

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Companies increasingly make use of the services of private detectives to investigate whether their employees really They are on sick leave or they are faking itwhich would be reason enough to a disciplinary dismissal. According to the detectives themselves, the companies that use their services do so because they previously They already have signs that there is fraud, which is why the majority of cases that are investigated agree with the companies that hire them and end up in disciplinary dismissal. However, in some cases, the way that evidence is obtained is the key to the success of the case. This is what happened to the employee of a beauty center in Barcelona. Despite being able to prove that there had been fraud, a sentence The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia declared the dismissal null and void and forced the company to compensate its employee. Medical leave and dismissal. The employee at the beauty center went to the doctor because of pain in her left hand and back, and they gave her the temporary disability leavewith rest and rehabilitation to recover. While she was still on sick leave, the company began to suspect that perhaps she was not that sick and decided to hire a private detective to check what she was doing outside of work. The detective prepared a report in which he noted that the worker had performed a manicure service for which she had charged 35 euros in cash while she was still on sick leave. With that report as a key piece in its argument, the company fired her via disciplinary dismissal, alleging that she had broken trust and that she was taking advantage of her leave to work on her own. In your dismissal letter you could read: “(…) you summoned, and performed a manicure treatment on, a person who was accompanied by said company (of detectives), at the aforementioned address, and charged this person in cash 35 euros for the service performed. The company has sufficient evidence, images and videos that confirm the regularity of these events.” What the court decides. The worker appealed the dismissal because she understood that it was unfair and was based on evidence obtained illegally. In the first instance, the Social Court No. 1 of Barcelona agreed with the company and declared that the dismissal was appropriate, and assigned the employee to collect 771.15 euros for untaken vacations plus 10% late payment interest. But did not recognize compensation some. The story changed when the case reached the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJCAT), when the worker appealed that first sentence. The Social Court reviewed how the detective’s evidence had been obtained and concluded that it was invalid because it had been obtained by inducing the situation. That is to say, something that was already happening had not been observed, but rather the opportunity had been created for the employee to do that manicure. What Detectives Can and Can’t Do. The case puts on the table what private detectives can do when investigating a person on sick leave and what lines they cannot cross. From Sentinel Private Detectivesremember that the law “prohibits them from taking images or evidence of events that occur in the intimate part of people’s lives. The garden is also considered an extension of the home,” so they cannot record there if it is a closed space. The investigation agency points out that their work should focus on “following and observing, without forcing situations,” and that their role is that of “mere observers of facts and behaviors.” Jordi Briñoldirector of Brininvest Detectiveshighlights that its activity is regulated by the Private Security Law and for the Civil Procedure Law, and that in cases of sick leave they can only act in “open spaces.” According to his explanation, “anything that happens in intimate spaces or that has what is called an expectation of privacy, we cannot access there”, and any monitoring must comply with what he calls “the triple judgment of proportionality”, that is, that the evidence is adequate, necessary and that it does not take longer than reasonable. The researcher clarifies that they can carry out actions under pretext (for example, making an appointment in a publicly announced consultation), but “we cannot provoke an unnatural response”, which fits with the idea that the person under investigation cannot be induced to commit the infraction. Why the detective’s evidence is useless. In this case, the court considers that the detective did not limit himself to looking from the outside at what the convalescent employee was doing as his regulations dictate, but that he intervened to make the behavior happen for which she was later punished. Along these lines, the ruling links with the doctrine of the Supreme Court that rejects evidence based on provocation, and remembers that situations cannot be fabricated and then used as an excuse to fire. By removing the detective’s report from the case, the company’s entire argument collapsed, so the Court understands that the true reason for dismissal is that the worker I was on medical leavesomething that Law 15/2022 prohibits using illness as a reason to dismiss a person because it represents discrimination due to illness. For this reason, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia declares the dismissal void, orders that the company reinstate the employee, pay her all the salaries that she stopped receiving during the time that the judicial process lasted and pay her 7,501 euros for moral damages, in addition to 600 euros in defense fees. In Xataka | Social Security has published the data on sick leave in 2024 and we have bad news: we have broken a record Image | Unsplash (Behnaz Kh)

we have the highest unemployment in the EU and also the lowest number of job vacancies

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Spain presents a phenomenon that at first glance seems contradictory: although it maintains one of the highest unemployment rates among advanced countries, it also registers one of the lowest proportions of vacancies in the EU. Understand this paradox It requires looking beyond the numbers and analyzing how employment supply and demand really work in the Spanish labor market. According to According to the INE, the unemployment rate in Spain is 10.5%, being the highest in the OECD compared to other developed countries, where the average is around 4.5%. At the same time, according to data According to Eurostat, the vacancy rate in Spain is only 0.9%, well below the European average of 2.1%. What is a vacancy? To understand why this combination occurs, it is helpful to define what a vacancy is. In the Eurostat definition This does not equate to “positions that the country would generally need to fill”, but to “newly created, vacant or about to become vacant paid position for which the employer is taking active steps and is willing to take additional steps to find a suitable candidate outside the company, and which the employer intends to fill immediately or within a specified period for which there is an active search and with an intention to fill soon.” So it is not “everything that would need to be hired in general”, but rather what is open at that moment. It’s like a photo of that exact moment, but it doesn’t show its reality. The “logic” behind the paradox. When a labor market grows, many vacancies can be expected to arise because there is more demand for workers. If, in addition, there is little unemployment, that demand tends to translate quickly into contracts. However, in Spain the reality is different. Although employment has grown in recent years, and there are busier people than ever (with membership records to Social Security), unemployment remains high compared to the EU, and vacancies do not increase at the expected rate. Mismatches between labor supply and demand. A key factor noted in the official reports is the mismatch between the skills that companies demand and those offered by unemployed people. That is, it can there are positions availablebut not that they correspond to the skills of those seeking employment. This type of mismatch is reflected in specific sectors (technology, engineering, health care) where companies claim to have difficulties find suitable profileswhile at the same time there are workers who cannot find a job. Some economists also highlight that the available offers tend to concentrate in sectors with high seasonality and little stability, such as services or tourism, where many vacancies are seasonal or short-term, which does not encourage all the unemployed to join immediately. Poorly distributed employment. Another element to consider is labor mobility. In Spain, there is a great imbalance between the territories with the greatest job offer and those with the greatest demand for employment. That is to say, employment is concentrated in large cities and industrial areas, while unemployment figures skyrocket in rural areas and in emptied Spain, contributing to maintaining this mismatch between the location of supply and demand. On the other hand, the stagnation of vacancies can also be explained by the high labor market rotation. Many times the position remains current and what happens is that it is the employees who rotate through that position. The job is still there, but it does not always appear as a “new vacancy” in the statistics, so the vacancy rate may be low, although real employment grows due to the high turnover of that position.​ For example, a waiter position is not listed as vacant, but the restaurant hires a new employee for that position every few months. The position is not vacant for statistical purposes, but the labor market does not stop registering new hires. What does this paradox tell us? That Spain has a lot of unemployment and few vacancies compared to the EU does not mean that there are no jobs available. What it indicates is that the labor market is functioning with difficulties: positions offered do not always fit the profile of unemployed people, there are great differences between sectors and an important part of the employment is temporarywhen many workers seek stability. Therefore, even when there are vacancies, they do not always end up being consolidated in the form of contracts. This situation does not depend only on a specific economic moment of prosperity or crisis, but also on underlying problems in the Spanish labor market. That this paradox continues over time points to the need to improve training, facilitate mobility between sectors and territories, raise the quality of employment and have statistics more adjusted to the reality of the labor market in Spain. In Xataka | In Belgium you could collect unemployment indefinitely. Your government has a new idea: put everyone to work Image | Unsplash (Mika Baumeister)

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