Is determining the gender of chickens Britain’s worst job?

Chick sexing, the process of determining whether newborn chickens are male or female, may pay £40,000 per year on average, but the poultry industry is apparently struggling to find new recruits for what has been called the hardest job in the UK. 

Sure, the wage may seem like reason enough to be sending your CV over to one of the many companies that provide chickens to the food industry, but the long hours, crazy targets and difficulty of the task apparently make it hard to recruit and keep people in the job. 

First of all, the miniscule differences between the male and female chickens needs to be learned. According to experts, this takes some three years to learn! Think about it…who wants to spend three years in a classroom looking at chicken genitalia? 

In addition to the difficulty in learning to become a chick sexer, the job itself sounds absolutely crazy. The hours are long for one – shifts will not finish until an order has been completed, which can take as long as 13 hours. 

During this period, members of staff on the floor are expected to sort between 800 and 1,200 chicks per hour. That's one chicken gender identified every three to five seconds. No time to stop and chat about the football from the weekend then! And despite working at a ridiculously fast speed, the expected accuracy rate is between 97 and 98 per cent. 

According to the latest industry figures, there are some 150 people in the UK who undertake this job. However, in the last year, the sector managed to recruit a grand total of zero. Apparently a shortage of chick sexers amounting to just 15 people could see the UK lose many foreign contracts. 

When conditions are taken into account, though, it's suddenly not as hard to see why chick sexer is one of the hardest positions in the UK to fill. After all, would you want to spend so long staring at the underside of a chicken each day? We know we wouldn't.