MILLIONS of people could be “condemned” to working for 60 years in the “gig economy”, with low wages and low job security.

That was the warning from the head of the recruitment industry’s professional body, who warned that the working world was becoming “polarised”, fuelling inequality and in-work poverty.

Kevin Green, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said millions of skilled jobs were disappearing, making it harder for people to progress in their careers.

“We’ve got a polarisation of the jobs market. We’ve got more high-paid jobs, more low-paid jobs, but the jobs in the middle are the ones being eliminated and destroyed,” he told the latest Jobshop UK Directors’ Lunch at the Harbour Heights hotel in Poole.

“These jobs are the stepping stone jobs,” he said, often filled by graduates or mothers returning to work.

“What this means is we’re going to have a chasm in the jobs market where it’s more and more difficult for people to progress because those jobs don’t exist.”

He said automation would affect 38 per cent of jobs in the UK. “Ten million jobs are going to be significantly impacted and potentially destroyed,” he said.

At the same time, rising life expectancy meant 90 per cent of today’s children could expect to reach the age of 100.

“You can’t retire at 50 if you live to 100,” he added.

“You end up with greater inequality, greater in-work poverty, you end up with a society where lots of people have a choice of affluence and are OK and a lot of people are doing two or three jobs – no pension, no paid holiday, no ability to get invested in their skills and capabilities, but all the jobs in the middle have been eroded.

“We’re potentially condemning people to 60 years of living like that. Sixty years of just getting by. Sixty years of just about getting three or four gigs, trying to scrape enough money to do this, enough money to do that.

“What this leads to is greater dissatisfaction. It leads to some of the things we’ve started to see already. The Brexit referendum. Donald Trump – I sit there every time I see him and I say ‘How did that happen?’”

Mr Trump’s election victory last year was because he had promised to save jobs in America’s “rust belt”, Mr Green said. “’We’re going backwards in time’ was his message. ‘I’m going to bring back coal mines and steel plants’ because people were disaffected and disillusioned.”

Mr Green – who will stand down from his post next year – said Britain needed to change its education system so it was no longer an “exam factory” but encouraged creativity and problem solving.

Businesses needed to look at how they hire. “There’s absolutely no proof that an interview is a good selection technique. None. We’ve known for 30-40 years it’s an absolutely poor predictor of job performance,” he said.

Employers instead needed to ensure they were testing for the qualities they needed in their organisation, he said.

Although 8.5million people work part time, 92 per cent of job adverts did not mention part-time or flexible working, he said. “So if you happen to work in a part time job you’re trapped, you can’t move anywhere,” he said.

Business also needed to help create a better learning environment. “We put all our training and development for all our lives into the first 15 years of our lives, which is just nonsense,” he said.

“This life-long learning crusade means government needs to change, business needs to change and we potentially and our children need to change. If we don’t, I think we end up with greater inequality, greater in-work poverty, greater dissatisfaction, people going to the left and right politically looking for someone to blame.”

He called for leaders whom the workforce wanted to follow.

“The problem with British management and leadership is we think we’re at the top. We get the car parking space, we’re the ones that get the extra bonuses,” he said.

“Our job is at the bottom – to create the right culture and learning so that people can be at their best.”