We find that with the launch of ChatGPT the supply of potential apprentices, in the form of search queries for apprenticeship positions, decreases substantially by, on average, about 8 percent.

In this paper, we show how the unexpected launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 had an immediate, significant, and long-lasting effect on young people's search behavior for apprenticeship vacancies. The impact on search behavior for specific occupations is of great economic importance as it is a high-stakes decision.

In this paper, we show the causal influence of the launch of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT on the search behavior of young people for apprenticeship vacancies. There is a strong and long-lasting decline in the intensity of searches for vacancies, which suggests great uncertainty among the affected cohort. Analyses based on the classification of occupations according to tasks, type of cognitive requirements, and the expected risk of automation to date show significant differences in the extent to which specific occupations are affected. Occupations with a high proportion of cognitive tasks, with high demands on language skills, and those whose automation risk had previously been assessed by experts as lower are significantly more affected by the decline. However, no differences can be found with regard to the proportion of routine vs. non-routine tasks.