• Business travel to more affordable cities is rising, according to two firms that book work travel.
• Data from Engine suggests business travel demand is booming in cities like Tampa and Charlotte.
• Business travel boomed in 2024, but corporations are also looking for cost-efficient options.

Traditional business travel hot spots like New York City, Las Vegas, and Chicago are facing some new competition.

Employers are increasingly looking toward destinations with more affordable prices and other perks for business travelers, said Ariel Katen, director of product with a focus on group bookings at Engine, a work-travel management platform.

"We're seeing a lot of up-and-coming cities, like in Florida, which is really interesting," Katen told Business Insider, adding that a new crop of cities is becoming more popular for businesses to host events for their teams.

"If you had to get the entire team down somewhere, where are you going to find more affordable hotel rooms? Is that New York City or is that Tampa?" she said.

A 2024 study from Deloitte found that while businesses were largely planning to increase their spending on corporate travel, some were concerned about high prices and looking for ways to cut back on costs, like by requiring lower-cost flights or hotels.

Data from Engine and other travel platforms suggest that more affordable cities, including in the South, are becoming increasingly popular for business travel.

Here are five trending business-travel destinations.

Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina, was among the cities Engine identified as growing in demand for business travelers, citing a 5% year-over-year increase in room pricing as of January.

FCM Travel, another corporate travel management platform, also identified Charlotte as a top city for business travel in its 2024 report, released in December. The company found that business travel to Charlotte increased by 9% year over year in 2024.

Orlando

Katen said Orlando was one of the Florida destinations trending for business travel, with infrastructure for conventions and entertainment options contributing to its appeal, especially in the age of blended travel, or "bleisure."

FCM Travel also found that business travel to Orlando increased by nearly 11% year over year in the second half of 2024, more than any other city.

Nashville

FCM Travel found that business travel to Nashville increased by more than 8% year over year in the second half of 2024.

Nashville has transformed into a booming business hub in recent years, driven in part by industries like healthcare and tech.

Denver

Engine said Denver has shown sustained room price increases for corporate bookings, as the city's mix of convenient amenities and access to the outdoors appeals to leisure travelers. Hotel room pricing was up nearly 6% year over year in January, according to data Engine shared with BI.

FCM Travel also found business travel to Denver increased by 5% year-over-year in 2024.

Tampa

Data from Engine showed Tampa as another trending Florida destination, with hotel room pricing up a whopping 16% year over year in January.

Tampa has been identified as an emerging tech hub and has experienced an increase in startups post-pandemic.

• 26-year-old Michael Gormley founded the Nantucket pedicab service "NanTukTuk" to avoid a corporate job.
• He was only allowed to accept tips the first summer, and he slept in the bed of his truck for weeks.
• Over time, NanTukTuk gained traction, and Gormley has signed contracts worth as much as $10,000.

This story is based on a conversation with Michael Gormley, the 26-year-old founder and CTO (chief tricycle officer) of NanTukTuk. Business Insider has verified his identity. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I had an entry-level corporate sales job lined up postgrad in 2021.

I wasn't ready for that. I couldn't grasp living the 9-to-5 lifestyle.

I had a cousin who lived on Nantucket, and he told me to check it out. I did, and it was the best summer of my life. I worked at a restaurant with a bunch of people from Croatia and became super good friends with them. I visited them in Croatia for what was supposed to be 10 days, and ended up traveling through different parts of the world for the next two years.

10 months of that time, I owned a little market in Sri Lanka, and my market relied on the tuk-tuks to bring customers to us. I'd already thought pedicabs would be a fun idea after going to school in Charleston, where they're popular.

I knew that they would work in Nantucket — and I figured that'd be a good way to keep the Peter Pan plan going a little longer and push off growing up.

The summer I started NanTukTuk was the worst of my life

Nantucket is a traditional New England town, and people were not open to a new business. It took about 10 months and a dozen advisory committee hearings to get approval for the business.

After I got approval in July, I started the business, and it was the worst summer of my life. Everything was barely working out. I was so close to just collapsing, and I perpetually felt like I was on the brink of disaster.

I bought two pedicabs at about $3,500 each, which was a devastating blow for me at the time. I had a great first few days of business, but then the novelty wore off and people stopped giving me money. The town prohibited me from charging rides the first season, so people could only give me gratuity, and I had a handful of people who just weren't paying me.

I thought I could figure out housing, but it's like $6,000 to rent a comfortable spot here. So I spent the first few weeks living out of the bed of my truck in a remote beach parking lot because it's illegal to camp here.

I was miserable. I would be up until 2:00 a.m. working and then the sun would rise early in the morning, and I would be in the bed of my truck with the black tarp that rolls over the bed. It was so hot.

I was making enough, but not that much, and I was like, all right, maybe a 9-to-5 isn't such a bad idea after all.

The business started to turn around

The next season, we ended up getting two more tuk-tuks and hired three people.

I ended up meeting people who helped me out and gave me close to free and discounted housing for periods of time over the last couple of years.

Blue Flag Capital, a private equity firm, helped me store the tuk tuks and fed me business through their hotel and restaurant guests. If it weren't for them, I don't know if I would have made it.

I created a spreadsheet of every wedding planner and venue on Nantucket and contacted all of them. I also gave a flyer and pamphlet to every hotel concierge and put door hangers on every house in the wealthiest neighborhood of Nantucket.

It took time and credibility to prove to everyone that we weren't scamming them — and a handful of influential people in the community to start posting and talking about it.

In New York City, it gets confusing for customers because there are different rates per person or per block. I always confirm the final price with the rider before they get on. I tell my employees to charge in the $10 to $50 range and be very upfront with the cost so that no one is offended.

This year, I'm signing more contracts. Some are worth $100 and others are worth thousands. I made $10,000 off an advertising contract last year.

I usually make about $1,000 for events, but I have a good amount of events priced between $2,500 and $4,000. It depends on how many tuk-tuks are booked and for how many hours. Ideally, people book out all four. We can only fit two to three people in the tuk-tuk, and we have a specific zone that we can operate in.

At weddings or other events, tuk-tuks ride the couple around the town and deliver people to the main venue. It's useful for people with mobility impairments or women wearing heels. We also work with hotels and restaurants to provide transportation to guests. Kids love riding in the tuk-tuks, and sometimes, parents will pay us to take them on loops.

I don't plan on doing it forever

I love collaborating with other small businesses. I also don't need to get approval for anything from a boss, and I never get tired of it. It's just intoxicating. There's always the thought of how else I can get revenue streaming. Or, what can we change about this to make it better?

In the long term, there's only so much money that can be made from it. I also work seven days a week, and it consumes me. I joke that I don't have a boss, but I have no freedom. I don't mind that, but in the long term, I want to do it for something with higher potential.

I think after one or two more seasons, it will have served its purpose, where I've learned a ton, worked a ton, and it could help inform me on my next steps.

At the end of the day, NanTukTuk allowed me to network tremendously and avoid the corporate world, and I'm forever in debt to it for that.

• AI, electrification, and more onshore manufacturing in the US will further drive energy demand.
• The Department of Energy estimates that the nuclear sector will create 375,000 new jobs by 2050.
• About 60% of the current nuclear workforce is between the ages of 30 and 54, per DOE.

The nuclear sector is approaching an inflection point where the need for a more reliable energy solution in the next few decades is about to confront an aging workforce that's prime for retirement.

A big driver of nuclear demand — that is, artificial intelligence — may also be part of the solution.

"I think there's sort of this two-way street on AI and nuclear," Craig Piercy, CEO of American Nuclear Society, told Business Insider. "AI needs nuclear because AI needs energy to run the data centers that run AI. And then AI is going to help nuclear be more efficient."

The US has seen a cyclical demand for nuclear power from the 1960s to the present.

A 1987 paper published by the International Atomic Energy Agency said that by 1970, about 90 nuclear units across 15 countries went online. However, by the next decade, growth slowed due to increased public resistance to nuclear energy, tighter government regulations, and the high-profile disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.

Since then, nuclear power entered a period of inertia, which created a gap between experts with institutional knowledge and the industry's future.

The Department of Energy found that 60% of the nuclear energy workforce was between the ages of 30 to 54. The agency said that a significant portion of the workforce is likely to retire over the next decade, which will lead to increased job opportunities in the sector.

"The nuclear industry has been stagnant for some time now," Massimiliano Fratoni, chair of the nuclear engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, told BI. "So a lot of the know-how got lost because people retire, so there is a need to catch up."

The energy demand curve

Artificial intelligence — and the power-hungry data centers behind the technology — have put nuclear energy back on the map in just the past three years.

Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, which are fueling the AI demand, are investing in newer reactor designs such as small modular reactors (SMRs), driving what BI has called "a nuclear renaissance."

Just four SMR companies, for example, have received nearly $3 billion in equity funding, BI previously reported.

It's not only AI that's driving the need for a reliable and constant source of energy.

Piercy, the American Nuclear Society CEO, said the US's push toward electrification and domestic manufacturing, which has been a top priority for the second Trump administration, will also significantly increase energy demand.

"For the last 20 years or so, US electricity demand has essentially been flat. You could draw a straight line from 2007 to 2022," he said, adding that the "demand curve" was at 1% or less. "In the last two years, we're looking now at 2 or 3% energy demand growth over the next 10 years. Everyone's assumptions about how much electricity we're going to need have gone way up."

As nuclear is increasingly considered an alternative energy solution, the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that 375,000 additional workers with technical and non-technical backgrounds, such as construction and manufacturing, would be added to the sector over the next two decades.

"I think essentially what we're looking at here is a tripling or more of the workforce by 2050," Piercy said.

A digital assistant for nuclear workers

At Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded R&D center located in the suburbs of Lemont, Illinois, the lab's senior nuclear engineer, Richard Vilim, is finding ways to automate some jobs at nuclear plants, which may help with some of the lifting for the incoming workforce demand.

"Humans will always be there in the loop," Vilim told BI in an interview. But there are what he called more "prosaic" tasks that could be assigned to a computer and help nuclear plants run more efficiently.

"For example, just monitoring if there's anything going wrong. People, humans do that," Vilim said. "Now you can assign that to an algorithm."

One automation tool Vilim works with is PRO-AID, or Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis. It can be thought of as a digital assistant for monitoring and diagnosing reactors.

Vilim said the earliest iterations of PRO-AID were developed around the late 1990s. But over the next few decades, and with the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, PRO-AID has been updated with a few new tricks, including reasoning abilities.

Vilim said that before 2022, PRO-AID would be able to tell an operator or system engineer whether there was a leak or if a particular component went offline.

What operators can do now is ask PRO-AID: Why?

"So we're now using ChatGPT-type algorithms to go into the inner workings of the model, examine the logic that led to the diagnosis, and compose an answer into human-understandable form," Vilim said. "So not only does the operator learn, 'Oh, there's a leak outside containment,' he or she can query the system and say, 'Well, why do you say that?'"

Vilim said that PRO-AID continues to be improved so that the tool churns out answers that are much easier for the human worker to understand.

With the tool, Argonne is also figuring out how to develop remote monitoring systems so that a human worker cannot only monitor away from the site, adding to the safety factor, but also monitor multiple systems at once. Vilim roughly estimates that the number of systems one operator could remotely monitor could increase by a factor of 10.

Fratoni, the UC Berkeley professor, said the current workforce at power plants is quite large. One of the equations to solve is how to reduce the on-site manpower at a single plant.

Could AI meet the gap?

"Potentially," he said. "Potentially."

• We moved from Los Angeles to Colorado in 2020 and thought our move would be temporary.
• When we found out I was pregnant, we started to wonder whether staying would be better for us.
• In the end, we stayed in Colorado. We love living near our parents, and we're less stressed here.

In 2020, my husband and I packed up our apartment in Los Angeles and drove to Colorado, where we'd both grown up. I'm a screenwriter, and my husband works at an augmented reality startup — both unpredictable, high-pressure jobs. LA had always made sense professionally, even when it stressed us out personally and financially.

Since moving to the West Coast in our early 20s, we had never been out of LA for more than a few weeks at a time, but with the rise of remote work, it felt like the right moment. We thought we'd be there for a year at most — long enough to do some hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be close to family and the splendor of the Rocky Mountains for more than just a quick weekend or holiday trip.

But when I got pregnant, we started asking ourselves some big questions.

We started to wonder if we'd ever move back to LA

What would it be like to raise a child in LA? Could we keep up with the cost of housing, childcare, and healthcare? Given the tumult in the entertainment industry and the uncertainty of a tech startup, could we rely on steady work?

We crunched the numbers. We could do it, but we'd have to make some sacrifices. A small apartment. No margin for overspending. Our baby's college fund or our retirement funds, but not both. And paying for daycare was out of the question, which meant one of us would have to quit our job to be a stay-at-home parent. Was the proximity worth it, and was the stress?

And the biggest question of all: When we thought about raising our family, what image came to mind?

Then, when we broke the news about my pregnancy to our respective parents, their unbridled joy confirmed what we had already been feeling. We wanted to raise our baby surrounded by that joy.

Staying in Denver was the right move for us

So we signed an 18-month lease for an apartment in Denver. The cost of living was still high, and both of our careers remained unpredictable. But we had something invaluable: support. Two sets of grandparents, both within driving distance.

When our son was born, they showed up with enchiladas and apple pie, with confident arms willing to rock the baby to sleep at four in the morning, with the tender blessings of someone we wholly trusted, saying, "Go lie down, I've got it."

There were days I worried we'd taken a step back by not returning to LA. That we were pressing pause on our careers, especially for me as a screenwriter, with the industry so concentrated in California. But as the newborn haze began to lift, I started to see it differently.

In many creative fields, especially as a freelancer, there's no HR department, no paid parental leave, no road map. A startup doesn't offer much certainty, either. What we needed — more than a city, more than a scene — was a support system.

This isn't a story of everything magically working out. Daycare in Denver can be prohibitively expensive, but we've figured out a childcare schedule that works for us and the grandparents so we can do our jobs. Work opportunities ebb and flow, and the hustle is much harder all these miles away. And truthfully, I miss the momentum of LA — the energy, the industry, the hunger.

But then I step outside and gaze in wonder at the mountains on the horizon. I see my baby's tiny hand wrapped around my dad's finger, and I feel it in my chest: this is the life we couldn't afford in LA — not just financially but emotionally.

We get to raise our child knowing he will have a close relationship with his grandparents. We're not stretched to the point of breaking. We haven't had to choose between our work and our child. We get to be present. That kind of presence — that kind of joy — is worth everything.

• Justin Ghio and his fiancé rent a house in San Diego to save on housing costs.
• Renting has given them the financial flexibility to take vacations and consider having a third kid.
• The couple is far from alone in putting off homeownership.

Justin Ghio and his fiancé wanted to make the plunge into homeownership when interest rates plummeted at the height of the pandemic in 2020. They made offers on four houses in San Diego, but they were outbid on all of them.

Soon enough, home prices and mortgage rates were soaring amid a buying frenzy, and they felt they'd missed their opportunity to buy.

"I'd always hoped to own a home," Ghio said. "With the rising interest rates, it just fiscally wasn't seemingly responsible to make that decision to try to buy."

But now, Ghio, a 35-year-old talent director, says he's relieved they didn't stretch their budget to buy. Renting is significantly cheaper than owning a home in San Diego, like in many hot housing markets, and Ghio is among a growing number of Americans choosing to keep renting rather than take on a hefty mortgage.

Three years ago, the couple and their eight-year-old twin daughters moved into their current rental home in a quiet San Diego neighborhood near their kids' school. They pay $3,795 a month in rent for their four-bedroom, two-bath house with a pool. Ghio appreciates not having to worry about paying for home maintenance and repairs — their landlord provides regular gardening and pool service.

And the rent is affordable. Between Ghio's salary and his fiancé's work as an esthetician, the couple brings in about $225,000 a year. They're enjoying the extra money they're saving by renting.

"Renting feels like we make over $200,000. I think buying would feel like we're broke," Ghio said. "And you don't work 12, 15 years after school to feel broke again — at least, it's a hard pill to swallow."

The decision not to buy felt especially strategic when Ghio was laid off from his previous job in talent acquisition last year. He applied for new jobs in multiple states, knowing that, because they rent, they had more flexibility to move. He's since found a new role at a translation services company in the city, but he's had to take a hefty pay cut.

Are you renting a home longer than you thought you would, or have you become a renter again later in life? Share your experience with this reporter at [email protected].

Zillow estimates that their rental house would sell for about $1 million. A mortgage on a comparable house in their neighborhood would likely far exceed their rent, not to mention the costs of home maintenance, insurance, and purchasing fees. If they were to buy their rental house with a 20% down payment and about a 7% interest rate, it would cost the couple about $5,300 a month, before taxes and insurance, according to Zillow's mortgage calculator.

This isn't unusual. A study from the National Association of Realtors found that in 2024, homebuyers purchasing starter homes in 50 major cities spent over $1,000 more on housing costs each month than renters did.

The couple has avoided becoming "house-poor," and instead, they budget more for vacations and their kids' extracurriculars. Ghio doesn't want to sacrifice the family's quality of life and "the ability to enrich our girls' childhood in a way that is unique and fun through experiences" just to own a home.

The couple is also saving for their wedding and considering having a third child.

"We're trying to be really pragmatic and just be like, we cannot afford a child if we buy a house," Ghio said. "The expenses would probably push us to the brink."

Renting a home seems like the smartest choice for now. But if circumstances change down the road, Ghio said he's open to buying.

"We're looking at things in two-year, three-year, four-year chunks," he said. "I'm not going to draw a line in the sand and say, 'No, never.'"

• Companies are listing fewer jobs and taking longer to fill them, frustrating job seekers.
• Economic uncertainty and ghost jobs are two key reasons some positions aren't getting filled.
• Some companies are delaying hiring, while others post roles to maintain a pipeline of candidates.

Four years, 1,000 applications, and a dozen interviews. As their job searches drag on, Americans tell Business Insider they're wondering if companies want to fill open roles at all.

Since last fall, BI has heard from more than 750 struggling job seekers, ranging between the ages of 18 and 76. Many shared frustrations about open roles they suspect were never filled — either because the posting stayed up for months, or the company went silent after they applied or interviewed.

"There are some firms on LinkedIn that are always advertising the same position and have been for almost a year now," Felipe Martins previously told Business Insider, before his 15-month job search ended. "I've applied to these positions at least half a dozen times now."

Martins' frustrations echo a trend that's become more common in recent years: job postings are taking longer to be filled, if they're filled at all. It's a key part of the US hiring slowdown — and why it's taking longer for many Americans to find work, even as the unemployment rate remains low, said Stephanie Hao, a senior economist at the workforce analytics provider Revelio Labs.

In October 2019, about 91% of job postings from companies in the Russell 3000 — a stock market index that monitors the performance of the 3,000 largest US public firms — were filled within six months, per data shared with BI by Revelio Labs. Of the jobs posted in October 2024, fewer than half were filled within the same six-month timeframe. Revelio Labs tracks job postings on the websites of Russell 3000 companies and cross-references them with LinkedIn profiles to estimate how many roles were filled.

Additionally, job postings from these companies have fallen from a peak of over 950,000 in 2022 to roughly 650,000 as of March, per Revelio data.

"Companies might leave job postings up, even when they have little intention of hiring, especially in uncertain labor markets," Hao said.

Why companies aren't filling open jobs

Hao said that some companies may have posted jobs they intended to fill, but heightened economic uncertainty in recent months caused them to pause or scrap those plans. Caution around inflation, tariffs, AI, and federal spending cuts has many CEOs using "the P-word."

Many job seekers BI heard from pointed to ghost jobs — positions posted online that companies aren't actively hiring for — as a key reason for their long job searches. However, Hao said roles that go unfilled due to economic conditions aren't quite ghost jobs.

"There's a difference between companies that put up postings with the intention to hire — and they don't end up hiring anyone due to not being able to find a good candidate or economic uncertainty — and not really having an intention of hiring somebody," Hao said.

She added that ghost jobs may be posted to give the impression that the company is growing, to keep a pipeline of potential candidates open, or to give overworked staff hope that their employers will soon hire help.

In some cases, companies might be hesitant to commit to hiring plans, but want to be prepared if they decide to move forward, so they'll post a job just in case, Hao said.

"While companies may not be actively hiring, they may still want to build a talent pipeline for the future, or may reconsider if an especially qualified candidate applies," she added.

Regardless of why a company isn't filling a role, it all adds up to frustration for the applicants in limbo.

Looking ahead, Hao said it's difficult to forecast the hiring landscape, but unless economic conditions change, many job openings could remain unfilled.

"Companies may not know what the hiring situation will look like, so I think it benefits them to always have a pipeline of people they can reach out to if they do end up hiring for a specific role," Hao said.

Sarah Cevallos misses her old job.

The 41-year-old spent much of her career building her own health tech practice in California, helping cancer patients navigate the complexities of their diagnoses. For a while, the role was rewarding — she felt her work was helping people. After she left in 2021, she bounced between opportunities at other health startups.

She was laid off from her most recent employer in summer 2024, but was confident her résumé would quickly secure her a C-Suite role elsewhere. For eight months, rejection after rejection wore down her morale.

"Being unemployed is not easy," Cevallos said. When she landed her current job — also in health tech, but with a heavier focus on finance instead of patient care — she felt a mix of relief and disappointment.

"I am currently at an organization where I am using a fraction of my skills, and I supplement my income with other consulting work," she told Business Insider. She added that she "had to make a decision": wait for the perfect role, or start earning a paycheck.

Taking a so-so job because you need the money isn't new, but the 2025 job search is especially characterized by a dwindling number of postings, the threat of artificial intelligence, and a high likelihood of being ghosted. The steady rise since early 2023 in the number of job seekers who count as long-term unemployed is a stark contrast to the quick job-hopping of the pandemic economic recovery.

Flip-flopping policy from the White House and tanking economic sentiment mean white-collar industries are wary of hiring. Traditional paths to work at nonprofits, science labs, and government agencies have been hit by sweeping federal funding and staffing cuts. Employees are staying put, even if they aren't happy in their roles.

In recent months, BI has heard from over 750 Americans across generations who are on the job hunt. Many don't have the luxury of choosing whether their passion or the money matters most at work. They're taking whatever they can find.

"It's got to be very, very difficult to make the choice of paying the bills or finding purpose at work," Kyle M.K., a talent strategy advisor at the job-search platform Indeed told BI. "Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, that is a decision that many people have to make."

Of course, there are still some bright spots in the overall economic outlook. The US added a higher-than-expected number of jobs in April, and inflation cooled. Some economists are also rolling back their predictions of a 2025 recession.

For now, Cevallos is grateful she earns enough money to afford expenses and save for her daughter's college education. Someday, she hopes to pivot back to helping oncology patients — the "industry that I dedicated my life to."

From dream job to 'I'll accept almost anything'

While many Americans do have a dream job in mind, some are finding that the work they feel most excited about isn't what pays the bills. A February report by the HR platform Nectar found that less than 40% of Americans are excited about their roles and responsibilities at work, and Gallup reported that employee engagement dropped to its lowest level in a decade last year.

"Unfortunately, sometimes people start a job and they realize it's not right for them, and they're either stuck or they're back in the job market," M.K. said. "Either way, not a great position for anyone to be in. It's not good for the job seeker. It's not good for the employer."

M.K. added that finding purpose in the work you do is "a very important part about being a human." Still, he said the economic climate has changed, and it's more common now for employees to focus on their foundational needs — like paying rent and affording groceries — over their psychological needs. This differs from a few years ago during "The Great Resignation," when Americans were quitting more often and prioritizing emotional fulfillment in their jobs, he said.

Herb Osborne, 71, can relate. Unable to afford retirement, he works full-time for a Bay Area business that makes olive oil and charcuterie accessories and combs through financial documents as a hotel auditor on weekends. His hours often stretch across seven days a week, leaving Osborne exhausted.

"I have not had a four- or five-day span of vacation in 10 years, and that tears at you," he said.

In an ideal world, Osborne wishes he were spending his 70s traveling and spending time with friends. He doesn't mind his current job, but he said the lack of PTO and work-life balance can feel crushing. He misses the joy he felt interacting with customers and leading staff in his early career — he held a string of managerial roles at Sharper Image, Little Caesars, and a jewelry store, and speaks of each one fondly.

"Financially, for me, it is really almost imperative that I work," he said, adding that he needs to bring home over $5,000 a month on top of his roughly $2,000 in Social Security to cover expenses. "I do work every day in order just to survive. And it's scary now at the age I'm at, because Social Security doesn't cover anything."

Abbey Owens, 21, is in a different life phase but facing a similar dilemma. The New York resident graduated this month with her bachelor's degree and, in a perfect scenario, she'd land a role in social media marketing. She's fascinated by marketing strategies, and after four years of studying and internships, she's "really good at it," she said. Since this past fall, she has applied to nearly 100 marketing and communications jobs, with no luck yet.

Because she wants to be financially independent postgrad, Owens said she's now open to taking any job she's "even somewhat" qualified for and would accept "any amount as long as it paid the bills."

"What I look for in a job has gotten so much broader in this process," she said. "It was very specific originally, and it's just really grown into: 'I'll accept almost anything.'" Her backup plan is to be a bartender.

However, M.K. said working a job you aren't happy doing has emotional consequences, even if it's necessary to earn a paycheck. He advised job seekers to prioritize jobs that best fit their skills and areas of interest, even if the job title or company itself is different from their initial goal. And, while people are hanging onto stability right now, M.K. said it doesn't necessarily mean they don't care about finding purpose at work. Some are likely biding their time until it feels safer to make a change.

"In a world of uncertainty, there is less movement between jobs and people are sticking around," he said. "But they haven't stopped searching for well-being."

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• You've heard of the "compliment sandwich" — softening a critique by bookending it with praise.
• There's a 3-step method you might find more helpful when having a difficult conversation.
• It's similar but takes the compliment sandwich a step further by closing on a suggested action step.

How do you effectively deliver constructive criticism to a colleague at work? Everyone who's ever done it (and anyone who's struggled to) knows it's not an easy conversation to have.

You probably also know, all too well, the makings of the "compliment sandwich," a long-relied-on fallback in cases like these.

It goes something like this: You open with a compliment to ease into the conversation, then segue into the critique you're really there to give, and finally close with another piece of praise to end on a good note.

While a compliment sandwich can be a solid starting framework (though it's not without its critics), a variation on it might offer a more effective way to share constructive feedback.

Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post, etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute, told us about that method. Their book, "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," went on sale May 20.

"Compliment sandwiches work, I understand that idea too: You want to give someone enough positive reinforcement that they can take the negative," said Post Senning. "But let's take one of those positive reinforcements and try to make it as constructive as possible."

One 3-step alternative riffs on elements of the compliment sandwich while advancing it a step further. It's the praise-concern-suggest method.

Before you get into the conversation, give your colleague a heads-up about what kind of talk it's going to be — think of priming them for a difficult conversation.

"This lets someone know, 'Am I about to say yes to a conversation about something I need to take very seriously, something I need to be open-minded about, something really great to share?'" said Post. "Because 'Do you have a minute to talk?' could be about anything."

During the actual conversation, mention why you're bringing up the issue and what your coworker, not just you, stands to gain from the discussion and any resulting solution.

"Don't assume that someone else understands your good intentions, but be willing to state them, be explicit, and say the obvious thing," said Post Senning. "Directly talk about it being for their benefit as well. Make it clear that you care about them, particularly if it's going to be more difficult."

You might say you're raising the concern because you care about the success of a project you're working on together, or about their success at work, or your professional relationship with each other.

Then, you'd start the same way you would with a compliment sandwich: Offer a piece of praise, as some workplace research has indicated that this can be important.

"Don't just start off with the bad; wading into the shallow end first, not diving too deep too quick, gives you a chance to feel someone else out and get a sense of their response or reaction," said Post.

For many people, the hardest step is bringing up the issue at hand. You want to be direct and clear, and remember why you're having the conversation in the first place.

It can be challenging, however, "you have to be willing to raise problems if you want change," said Post Senning.

Where this method differs from the compliment sandwich is its ending. Rather than closing on a compliment, you offer a possible solution or action step to address the issue you just raised.

"The cost of admission to raising an issue where you want change in someone else's behavior is a willingness to participate in the solution in some way," said Post Senning. "They may or may not take it, but just having done enough work to offer some future direction, some willingness to participate, to not just dump a problem on someone's lap, is important."

Lastly, it can help to depersonalize the criticism so it's about the issue, not the person. One way to do this is to say something like, "If the shoe were on the other foot, I would hope that you would feel comfortable talking to me about this."

It's a way of saying, "This isn't about you, this is about what's going on here, the work that we're doing, and I would really hope the same standards would apply to me" if the roles were reversed, said Post Senning.

And, of course, the conversation doesn't necessarily end with your closing suggestion.

"Be ready to listen, be ready to negotiate," said Post Senning. "You might have an idea. It's one thing to listen, but then there's a follow-up step. You also have to be willing to stay flexible and actually hear what you've just been listening to and reformulate your thinking in relation to it in terms of priming yourself mentally on the other side of that equation."

• Elon Musk has said Optimus — Tesla's humanoid robot — is the company's most important product.
• The billionaire said this week that Tesla would have "thousands" of Optimus robots working in its factories by the end of the year.
• Chris Walti, Tesla's first Optimus lead, told BI that humanoid robots are wrong for factory work.

Elon Musk dreams of Tesla's Optimus robots working in huge numbers in factories — but not everyone is convinced.

Chris Walti, the former team lead for Tesla's robot, told Business Insider that humanoid robots like Optimus were the wrong option for factory work.

Walti told BI that, although humanoid robots were a fascinating technology with enormous potential, human-shaped ones would be less effective in warehouses, logistics, and manufacturing.

"It's not a useful form factor. Most of the work that has to be done in industry is highly repetitive tasks where velocity is key," said Walti, who built the development team for Optimus.

Shortly after Walti spoke to BI, Musk told CNBC on Tuesday that Tesla expects to have thousands of Optimus units working in its factories by the end of the year, and said he was confident the company would be producing a million robots a year by 2030.

Musk has said Optimus, a 5-foot-8 humanoid robot that the company has said could be used for factory roles and as a mechanoid personal assistant, will be "the biggest product ever of any kind."

Tesla has recently released videos showing Optimus dancing, cleaning, and taking out the trash.

But at the demo at the company's robotaxi reveal in October, the Optimus robots that served drinks and interacted with attendees were later revealed to have relied on remote human operators.

Tesla said last June that two Optimus robots were already working at one of its factories, though it did not specify their roles. Musk has previously said that Optimus could take over menial and dangerous tasks from human workers.

Tesla isn't the only automaker exploring using humanoid robots in factories. BMW struck a deal last year with robotics company Figure to test robots at its South Carolina plant, and Chinese EV companies BYD, Xpeng, and Nio have also experimented with the technology.

Walti worked at Tesla for seven years before leaving in 2022 to found Mytra, which uses slab-shaped robots that can move in any direction to transport payloads across warehouses through giant, cage-like structures of "cells."

Walti said these were "much simpler form factors" than humanoids.

He described humanoid robots as an engineering problem "multiple orders of magnitude" more difficult to solve than self-driving cars, because general-purpose robots like Optimus are designed to have a wider range of movements than a car on the road.

He said robotics was not yet advanced enough to deploy humanoid robots properly, adding they were "kind of a ninth-inning robotics problem, and we're in the third inning."

Walt said the human form "evolved to escape wolves and bears. We weren't designed to do repetitive tasks over and over again. So why would you take a hyper suboptimal system that really isn't designed to do repetitive tasks and have it do repetitive tasks?"

At Tesla, Walti was tasked with troubleshooting production bottlenecks as the automaker ramped up production of the mass-market Model 3 EV in 2017.

Musk dubbed that infamously gruelling period "production hell," and the CEO said he slept on the production floor of Tesla's Fremont factory as the Model 3 ramp ran into problems.

Tesla's ambitious plans to rely heavily on autonomous robots to build the Model 3 didn't work as planned, and Musk later said in a post on Twitter, now X, that this level of automation was "a mistake."

"There was a very ambitious plan to automate a lot more than we probably should have, and it was clear the system was struggling," said Walti, who said he worked for nine months with his team to design a simpler robotics system for the factory.

After building the automaker's mobile robotics team, Walti became the senior manager in 2021 of the team building the "Tesla bot," which would later become Optimus.

Walti saw the robot as "a side project" for Tesla at the time.

He said he was surprised when Musk began talking up Optimus as the company's future, but added that it wasn't surprising, as the billionaire "wants to push the boundary of innovation and tech."

Tesla and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

• Trump restarted collections on defaulted student loans on May 5, after a five-year pause.
• James Southern, 63, is facing a $1,414 bill on his student loans.
• He can't afford to pay it, and he risks falling into default and having his wages garnished.

At the end of March, James Southern received a warning from his student-loan servicer stating: "Your account is seriously past due."

According to a bill statement reviewed by Business Insider, his servicer suggested he put forth $9,942 to make his account current, or he could make a payment of $1,414.71 to start chipping away at his delinquent student-loan balance.

Whether $9,000 or $1,000, Southern, 63, said he can't afford the bill, and he's gearing up to default and face the worst consequences for falling behind on student-loan payments: garnishment of wages or federal benefits.

"There will be no retirement. I'll die on the job," Southern said. "Even if I were at my full retirement age, they'd garnish the Social Security, so I'm still going to have to work in order to survive."

Southern is referring to President Donald Trump's move to restart collections on defaulted student loans on May 5 after a five-year pause. Student loans typically enter default after 270 days of missed payments. With the collections restart, defaulted borrowers are once again subject to wage and federal benefits garnishment.

The Department of Education has notified 195,000 defaulted student-loan borrowers that a portion of their federal benefits will be withheld beginning in early June. Southern has not yet received such notice; he has contacted his student-loan servicer for assistance making payments, and he said the only advice he said he has received so far is to pay his bill.

Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary, said during a House committee hearing on May 21 that since May 5, the department has collected back $100 million from borrowers behind on payments.

"We're on the right track," she said. McMahon previously wrote in an opinion piece that restarting collections is not a move to "be unkind to student borrowers. Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn't a victimless offense. Debt doesn't go away; it gets transferred to others."

Southern said he doesn't see how he can make any student-loan payment while on a five-figure salary and managing rent, food, and other monthly expenses.

"I cannot make that payment and survive," Southern said. "It just doesn't seem fair in the least bit to me."

'I cannot make that payment and survive'

The number of student-loan borrowers who transitioned into serious delinquency surged from 0.8% in 2024 to 8.04% in 2025, per the New York Federal Reserve. The increase was expected given that the moratorium on collections and credit reporting expired in October 2024. Now that Trump has restarted collections, it's an indication of how many more millions of borrowers, including Southern, are at risk of defaulting this summer.

Southern's six-figure student-loan balance comes from business school. He decided to go in the early 2000s to further his career, but after applying for over 50 jobs following his graduation, he wasn't able to land a career using his degree. He now works in security on a five-figure salary, and he said that on his current income, retirement is a pipe dream.

Rae Kaplan, a Chicago-based student-loan attorney, told BI that borrowers who are not yet in default can request a forbearance for financial hardship from their servicer. While the forbearance cannot be used for more than 36 months, "it buys you some time to figure out, 'Well, do I need a student loan attorney or somebody who can help me with the next steps in this process?' In the meantime, you don't have to worry that your loans are going to slip into default," Kaplan said.

Borrowers in delinquency also have access to income-driven repayment plans, but the Department of Education recently released data showing that nearly 2 million income-driven repayment applications still haven't been processed. If borrowers cannot access affordable monthly payments, they risk falling into default and facing collections.

Trump's tax bill, which the House recently passed, would also eliminate existing income-driven repayment plans and replace them with two less generous options.

"It's funny where you'll read on the notices and they're like, 'If you're having trouble, please contact us and we'll work with you,'" Southern said. When he called his servicer, the only help they offered him was help making a payment.

"I don't need you to help me make a payment. I need you to give me options," Southern said.

A Department of Education spokesperson previously told BI that the department is hoping to clear the backlog of income-driven repayment applications "over the next few months."

Older borrowers who rely on minimal income and Social Security are not reassured. Cheri, a 67-year-old student-loan borrower who voted for Trump, previously told BI that while she supports the administration collecting payments from borrowers, she doesn't think the abrupt restart is the right way to go about it.

"I think that turning people over to collections is a very drastic move after what we just went through over the past four years," Cheri said. "I'm opposed to that."

Alex Ricci, president of the National Council of Higher Education Resources, said at a panel on May 21 that while the scale of borrowers set to default is concerning, the impacts likely won't be immediately felt.

"The department's announcement only kick-started what will be a very long process using both voluntary and involuntary measures to start collecting on defaulted debt," Ricci said. "So there are a number of processes that the federal government has to restart, and that should give borrowers some lag time to get current with their payments."

Southern doesn't know what's next for him, and whether he might soon start facing garnishment of his wages and federal benefits. The only thing he does know: he won't be paying his $1,400 student-loan bill.

"It's been a struggle, a terrible struggle," Southern said. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Do you have a story to share about student loans? Contact this reporter at [email protected].