AI's Impact on Entry-Level Jobs: Challenges and Opportunities for Gen Z

A robot stole my internship: How Gen Z's entry into the workplace is being affected by AI

For years, the expression "the robot took my job" has brought to mind visions of machines replacing workers on factory floors. But Gen Z is facing a new challenge: the loss of internships and other entry-level positions to AI. Internships and junior roles have historically provided a predictable ladder into the workforce by providing new workers with the experience and skills needed for long-term career development. But as artificial intelligence (AI) spreads to every corner of the modern workplace, these roles are susceptible to being replaced by automation. Entry-level roles traditionally involve low-complexity, high-frequency tasks such as data entry, scheduling or drafting reports -- tasks that generative AI can do significantly cheaper and faster than a human. This almost certainly means fewer traditional bottom rungs on the career ladder. We are already seeing the impact of this: entry-level jobs are becoming scarcer, with candidates competing against a 14 per cent hike in applications per role, according to LinkedIn. No one's 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you're not alone. Read more from Quarter Life: Why is it so hard for young people to get jobs? How to deal with being the youngest in the office How to handle difficult conversations in your early career, from salary negotiation to solving conflict AI is changing the workplace The integration of AI across industries is fundamentally reshaping the job market. Nearly half of professionals worry AI will replace their jobs. There is good reason for this: by 2030, it's estimated that nearly 30 per cent of work could be automated by generative AI. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of executives say they are willing to use AI tools to drive up productivity at the expense of losing staff. Conversely, only one in three executives are willing to keep their staff at the expense of higher expected productivity. It is also projected that declines in traditional entry-level or junior roles in sectors such as food services, customer service, sales and office support work could account for nearly 84 per cent of the occupational shifts expected by 2030. Talent and entry-level role shortages in the future Data on AI and the future of work also points to another potential problem: a talent shortage for certain skill sets. A 2024 report from Microsoft and LinkedIn found that leaders are concerned with shortages in areas such as cybersecurity, engineering and creative design. Though this data might appear contradictory, it signals that in addition to fewer entry level positions being available, changes to job roles and skill sets are also on the horizon. As a result, competition for entry-level roles is expected to increase, with greater value put on candidates who can use AI tools to improve their productivity and effectiveness. Rather than simply eliminating jobs, many roles are evolving to require new capabilities. There is also growing demand for specialized talent where AI cannot yet fully augment human abilities. AI literacy is the new entry requirement As AI becomes more prevalent in the workforce, "entry-level" roles are no longer just about completing basic tasks, but about knowing how to work effectively with new technologies, including AI. Employers are beginning to place immense value on AI literacy. Two-thirds of managers say they wouldn't hire someone without AI skills and 71 per cent say they would prefer a less experienced candidate with AI skills over a more experienced one without them. With fewer entry-level positions available, young workers will need to figure out how to stand out in a competitive job market. But despite these challenges, Gen Z may also be the best-positioned to adapt to these changes. As digital natives, many Gen Z are already integrating AI tools into their work. A report from LinkedIn and Microsoft found 85 per cent are bringing AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot into the workplace, indicating they are both comfortable and eager to make use of this technology. This trend mirrors broader trends across the workforce. One report found 76 per cent of professionals believe they need AI-related skills to remain competitive. That same Microsoft and LinkedIn report found there has been a 160 per cent surge in learning courses for AI literacy. This growing emphasis on AI skills is part of a wider shift toward "upskilling" -- the process of enhancing skill sets to adapt to the changing conditions of the job market. Today, upskilling means leaning how to use AI to enhance, accelerate and strengthen your performance in the workplace. A new kind of entry-level job Since AI literacy is becoming a core career skill, being able to present yourself as a candidate with AI skills is important for standing out in a crowded entry-level job market. This includes knowing how to use AI tools, evaluate their outputs critically and apply them in a workplace context. It also means learning how to present AI skills on a resume and in interviews. Employers also have a role to play in all this. If they want to attract and retain employees, they need to redesign entry-level roles. Instead of eliminating entry-level roles, they should refocus on higher-value activities that require critical thinking or creativity. These are the areas where humans outperform machines, and where AI can act as a support rather than a replacement. But to make this work, employers need to re-evaluate their hiring practices to prioritize AI literacy and transferable skills over outdated experience requirements. The future of work isn't about humans being replaced by robots, but about learning how to use the technology to enhance skills and creating new entry points into the professional world.

A robot stole my internship: How Gen Z's entry into the workplace is being affected by AI

For years, the expression "the robot took my job" has brought to mind visions of machines replacing workers on factory floors. But Gen Z is facing a new challenge: the loss of internships and other entry-level positions to AI. Internships and junior roles have historically provided a predictable ladder into the workforce by providing new workers with the experience and skills needed for long-term career development. But as artificial intelligence (AI) spreads to every corner of the modern workplace, these roles are susceptible to being replaced by automation. Entry-level roles traditionally involve low-complexity, high-frequency tasks such as data entry, scheduling or drafting reports -- tasks that generative AI can do significantly cheaper and faster than a human. This almost certainly means fewer traditional bottom rungs on the career ladder. We are already seeing the impact of this: Entry-level jobs are becoming scarcer, with candidates competing against a 14% hike in applications per role, according to LinkedIn. The integration of AI across industries is fundamentally reshaping the job market. Nearly half of professionals worry AI will replace their jobs. There is good reason for this: By 2030, it's estimated that nearly 30% of work could be automated by generative AI. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of executives say they are willing to use AI tools to drive up productivity at the expense of losing staff. Conversely, only one in three executives are willing to keep their staff at the expense of higher expected productivity. It is also projected that declines in traditional entry-level or junior roles in sectors such as food services, customer service, sales and office support work could account for nearly 84% of the occupational shifts expected by 2030. Talent and entry-level role shortages in the future Data on AI and the future of work also points to another potential problem: a talent shortage for certain skill sets. A 2024 report from Microsoft and LinkedIn found that leaders are concerned with shortages in areas such as cybersecurity, engineering and creative design. Though this data might appear contradictory, it signals that in addition to fewer entry-level positions being available, changes to job roles and skill sets are also on the horizon. As a result, competition for entry-level roles is expected to increase, with greater value put on candidates who can use AI tools to improve their productivity and effectiveness. Rather than simply eliminating jobs, many roles are evolving to require new capabilities. There is also a growing demand for specialized talent where AI cannot yet fully augment human abilities. AI literacy is the new entry requirement As AI becomes more prevalent in the workforce, "entry-level" roles are no longer just about completing basic tasks, but about knowing how to work effectively with new technologies, including AI. Employers are beginning to place immense value on AI literacy. Two-thirds of managers say they wouldn't hire someone without AI skills and 71% say they would prefer a less experienced candidate with AI skills over a more experienced one without them. With fewer entry-level positions available, young workers will need to figure out how to stand out in a competitive job market. But despite these challenges, Gen Z may also be the best-positioned to adapt to these changes. As digital natives, many Gen Z are already integrating AI tools into their work. A report from LinkedIn and Microsoft found 85% are bringing AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot into the workplace, indicating they are both comfortable and eager to make use of this technology. This trend mirrors broader trends across the workforce. One report found that 76% of professionals believe they need AI-related skills to remain competitive. That same Microsoft and LinkedIn report found there has been a 160% surge in learning courses for AI literacy. This growing emphasis on AI skills is part of a wider shift toward "upskilling" -- the process of enhancing skill sets to adapt to the changing conditions of the job market. Today, upskilling means learning how to use AI to enhance, accelerate and strengthen your performance in the workplace. A new kind of entry-level job Since AI literacy is becoming a core career skill, being able to present yourself as a candidate with AI skills is important for standing out in a crowded entry-level job market. This includes knowing how to use AI tools, evaluate their outputs critically and apply them in a workplace context. It also means learning how to present AI skills on a resume and in interviews. Employers also have a role to play in all this. If they want to attract and retain employees, they need to redesign entry-level roles. Instead of eliminating entry-level roles, they should refocus on higher-value activities that require critical thinking or creativity. These are the areas where humans outperform machines, and where AI can act as a support rather than a replacement. But to make this work, employers need to re-evaluate their hiring practices to prioritize AI literacy and transferable skills over outdated experience requirements. The future of work isn't about humans being replaced by robots, but about learning how to use the technology to enhance skills and creating new entry points into the professional world. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tech layoffs show AI's impact extends beyond entry-level roles

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In a nutshell: The rapid advance of artificial intelligence is redrawing the boundaries of white-collar employment, leaving both novice and seasoned professionals uncertain about their future in the workforce. However, experts are divided over which group faces the greatest risk. Some within the industry, like Dario Amodei of Anthropic, argue that entry-level positions are most susceptible because their tasks are more easily automated. Amodei said that AI could "cannibalize half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years." Rising unemployment among recent college graduates has added fuel to these concerns, though the causes remain debated. Others see a different threat emerging for more experienced workers. Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, told The New York Times that AI could challenge "a class of worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine in a certain way of doing things." The implications of this shift are significant: if mid- and late-career professionals are displaced, the effects could ripple through the economy and even destabilize political systems. Data from sectors that have already embraced AI suggest that entry-level workers are feeling the brunt of the change. Payroll processor ADP reports that employment for workers with fewer than two years of tenure in computer-related fields peaked in 2023 and has since declined by about 20 to 25 percent. Customer service roles show similar patterns. Yet, according to Stanford researcher Ruyu Chen, employment for workers with greater tenure has increased in these same sectors. Research also indicates that AI is transforming the nature of jobs, sometimes to the advantage of more experienced staff. When Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT in 2023, researchers found that while junior coders used AI to complete tasks more quickly, midlevel coders leveraged it to support their teams and manage projects in unfamiliar programming languages. "When people are really good at things, what they end up doing is helping other people as opposed to working on their own projects," said Sarah Bana, one of the study's authors. She noted that AI amplified this tendency, potentially leading companies to hire fewer junior coders but more midlevel ones. Still, the risk to experienced workers is real. Danielle Li, an economist at MIT, explained that AI can "untether valuable skills from the humans who have traditionally possessed them. That state of the world is not good for experienced workers. You're being paid for the rarity of your skill, and what happens is that AI allows the skill to live outside of people." Li also suggested that the rise in unemployment among new graduates may reflect employers' expectations of needing fewer workers overall, not just at the entry level. Some law firms and technology companies have already reduced their reliance on experienced professionals. Robert Plotkin, a partner at a law firm specializing in intellectual property, said his firm now uses about half as many contract lawyers as before the advent of generative AI. "I've become very efficient at using AI as a tool to help me draft applications in a way that's reduced our need for contract lawyers," Plotkin said. Major technology firms have also made cuts that affect experienced employees. Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all conducted layoffs since 2022, with Microsoft's recent rounds including many middle managers and software developers. "Anything that is administrative, spreadsheet-related, where there's an email trail, a document-management type activity, AI should be able to perform fairly easily, freeing up time for managers to do more mentoring," said David Furlonger, a vice president at Gartner. "CEOs are implying in the data that we don't need as many of them as we did previously," he said. The motivations behind these layoffs are multifaceted. Gil Luria, an equity analyst at D.A. Davidson, said companies are cutting costs to maintain profit margins while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. He noted that software engineers at all levels are vulnerable, particularly those with higher salaries who resist adapting to new technologies. "There are senior people who have figured out how to get leverage out of AI and senior people who are insistent that AI can't write code," Luria said. Harper Reed, chief executive of 2389 Research, said that experienced coders with higher salaries and a reluctance to embrace AI are at risk. "How you decrease cost is not by firing the cheapest employees you have," Reed said. "You take the cheapest employee and make them worth the expensive employee." Studies suggest this is possible: recent research found that AI coding assistants increased the productivity of junior developers more than that of their experienced colleagues. Reed explained that it may soon be financially logical for companies to hire junior employees who use AI to perform what was once mid-level work, with a handful of senior staff overseeing them and almost no middle-tier employees. That, he said, is essentially how his company is structured.

Opinion | AI is coming for entry-level jobs. Everybody needs to get ready.

AI may replace a lot of entry-level skills. So how will workers acquire more advanced ones? Is the great AI disruption happening? Have we reached the point where AI starts displacing lots of workers? AI watchers know to ask these questions as jobs numbers roll in -- but no one knows when they will be answered and what the jobs market will look like when they are. Certainly, CEOs are saying that AI is coming for a lot of jobs, and soon -- perhaps as many as half of all white-collar workers. That's likely to show up first in entry-level jobs, where the basic skills required are the easiest to replicate, and in tech, where the ability to rapidly adapt the latest software tools is itself an entry-level job requirement. Sure enough, in recent years unemployment has risen fastest among new college graduates, which spurred LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman to write that the bottom rungs of the white-collar career ladder are "breaking." As Raman concedes, however, "we haven't yet seen definitive evidence that A.I. is the reason for the shaky entry-level job market." An analysis by the Economist suggests that the "relative unemployment" of young college graduates -- the ratio of their unemployment rate to the general jobless figures -- began rising in 2009, well before the first chatbots were released. Nor has there been any appreciable decline in the share of workers doing office jobs. So, no, it may not be happening yet -- at least not enough to leave definite patterns in the economic data. But if CEOs driving this change are to be believed, it is likely to eventually. Yet it doesn't have to be a disaster. Educators, CEOs and policymakers should start thinking now about what will replace the entry-level job -- not just for the workers who need a way to support themselves, but for the companies who will still need skilled mid- and high-level employees long after AI has automated away data entry and basic report-writing. Those workers, in turn, will need the human capital that is typically acquired by laboring in the trenches. That includes obvious things such as technical skills, knowledge of their industry and a professional network, but also a lot of tacit knowledge that is absorbed by watching your elders work and hearing their war stories: What are the most common pitfalls in our industry? Where are the ethical gray areas, and how do we resolve questions that fall into them? What does good management look like? What's the best way to handle conflicts with difficult co-workers? How should we balance competing priorities? None of this can be taught by a book, or by a LLM course. This know-how is transmitted human to human, in real time and in real life. Until now, that hasn't been a problem, because young employees doing grunt work picked up human capital along with their paycheck. AI disruption threatens that process. Entry-level workers' paychecks will be the first and most obvious casualties, but companies will feel the disruption soon enough as they try to hire the next generation of skilled mid-level workers and realize the economy has stopped cultivating them. If they are wise, they will look beyond the dazzling immediate possibility of smaller payrolls and think about developing the talent they'll need to stay competitive in the future. A brand-new talent pipeline will not be built by editorialists or researchers sitting in their offices, spinning out theoretical possibilities. Bosses who know what they need the pipeline to deliver and are willing to endure some patient trial and error to get it working, will construct it. As they work, however, they should partner with the operators of one of our biggest existing pipelines, the American university system. Universities have been successfully delivering fresh talent to companies for decades. Now, in the face of AI, they need to reimagine what they do. This doesn't just mean fighting chatbot-enabled cheating. The bigger threat to the higher education system as we know it is that many of the skills colleges develop, such as the ability to do basic research or write coherent prose, will be devalued in the job market as AI takes over. On the other hand, other skills universities cultivate -- such as critical thinking and analysis of text -- could empower graduates to use and evaluate AI tools. A job credential is not the only reason to pursue higher education. But the wage premium for college graduates is why so many people have been willing to pay steadily increasing tuition to secure one. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had completed a college degree. By 2017, that figure had expanded to a third of the population. That shift didn't just benefit the students who enhanced their intellectual capacities and their earning power; it also enabled a massive expansion of the higher education system and its other, nonpecuniary missions, such as developing engaged citizens and preserving and extending human knowledge. Those missions will be threatened unless universities can figure out how to teach different skills, ones that AI can't master. Otherwise, the value of a college diploma will fall, and many schools will close. It's lucky, then, that the great AI disruption hasn't happened -- yet. Schools and employers still have some time to figure out how to rebuild the talent pipeline for the 21st century. But they need to start planning now, because the investment in AI and user take up of the technology is happening on an astonishing scale and at blistering speed.

Teach First job applicants will get in-person interviews after more apply using AI

One of the UK's biggest recruiters is accelerating a plan to switch towards more frequent face-to-face assessments as university graduates become increasingly reliant on using artificial intelligence to apply for jobs. Teach First, a charity which fast-tracks graduates into teaching jobs, said it planned to bring forward a move away from predominantly written assignments - where AI could give applicants hidden help - to setting more assessments where candidates carry out tasks such as giving "micro lessons" to assessors. The move comes as the number of people using AI for job applications has risen from 38% last year, to 50% this year, according to a study by the graduate employment specialist Bright Network. Patrick Dempsey, the executive director for programme talent at Teach First, said there had been a near-30% increase in applications so far this year on the same period last year, with AI playing a significant role. Dempsey said the surge in demand for jobs was partly due to a softening in the labour market, but the use of automation for applications was allowing graduates to more easily apply for multiple jobs simultaneously. "The shift from written assessment to task-based assessment is something we feel the need to accelerate," he said. Dempsey said much of the AI use went undetected but there could be tell-tale signs. "There are instances where people are leaving the tail end of a ChatGPT message in an application answer, and of course they get rejected," he said. A leading organisation in graduate recruitment said the proportion of students and university leavers using AI to apply for jobs had risen to five out of 10 applicants. Bright Network, which connects graduates and young professionals to employers, found half of graduates and undergraduates now used AI for their applications. More than a quarter of companies questioned in a survey of 15,000 people will be setting guidelines for AI usage in job applications, in time for the next recruitment season. Kirsten Barnes, head of the digital platform at Bright Network, said employers had noticed a "surge" in applications. "AI tools make it easier for candidates of any age - not just graduates - to apply to many, many different roles," she said. "Employers have been saying to us that what they're seeing is a huge surge in the volume of applications that they're receiving." Breakthroughs in AI have coincided with downward pressure on the graduate and junior jobs market. Dartmouth Partners, a recruitment agency specialising in the financial services sector, said it was increasingly seeing applicants using keywords written in white on their CVs. The words are not visible to the human eye, but would instruct a system to push the candidate to the next phase of the recruitment process if a prospective employer was using AI to screen applications. Vacancies for graduate jobs, apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs with no degree requirement have dropped by 32% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, according to research released last month by the job search site Adzuna. These entry-level jobs now account for 25% of the market in the UK, down from 28.9% in 2022, it found. Last month, another job search site, Indeed, reported that university graduates were facing the toughest job market since 2018, finding the number of roles advertised for recent graduates had fallen 33% in mid-June compared with the same point last year. The Institute of Student Employers said the graduate and school-leaver market as a whole was not declining as rapidly as reported, however. Its survey of 69 employers showed job vacancies aimed at graduates were down by 7% but school-leaver vacancies were up by 23% - meaning there was an overall increase of 1% in a market earmarked for AI impact. Group GTI, a charity that helps students move into employment, said job postings on UK university careers job boards were up by 8% this year compared with last year. Interviews with graduate recruitment agencies and experts have found that AI has yet to cause severe disruption to the market for school and university leavers - but change is inevitable and new joiners to the white-collar economy must become skilled in AI to stand a chance of progressing. James Reed, the chief executive of the Reed employment agency, said he "feels sorry" for young people who have racked up debt studying for degrees and are encountering a tough jobs market. "I think universities should be looking at this and thinking quite carefully about how they prepare young people," he said. He added that AI would transform the entire job market. "This change is fundamental and five years from now it's going to look very different - the whole job market," he said.

'I've £90k in student debt - for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout

Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs. "I assumed it wouldn't be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications]," she said. "However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been 'carefully reviewed'. About 70% of jobs I didn't hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for." AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. "Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now - on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied]." In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, "which isn't that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax". Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history. As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country. Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master's degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May. "I've applied to about 150 entry-level jobs - in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions," she said. "So far I've had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream. "Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they're looking for. It feels dystopian." One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. "I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to," Martyna said. "Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt - for what? "They told us: 'If you don't go to university, you could be working in McDonald's.' I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland." Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree. "Jobs don't care if you have a degree," said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022. "I have a degree in visual communication and can't get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I'm frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I'm finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college." Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. "It's the best I could get," she said. Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI. "[I've read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don't know how to filter them," Schurer said. "If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market." Her older son, she said, had spent a "soul-destroying" five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections. "It appears that it's back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck," she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents. "AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one's success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know," agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. "But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal." The job market his students were graduating into was "tough, and about to get tougher", he predicted. "While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs." This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework. "Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago," said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. "Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve. "Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports." Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access. "What people want to do and what they're actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this," said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England. "But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare." Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since. "I've been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications - in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service," he said. Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was "no-brainer" that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely. "I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues." While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality. "My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in," said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master's in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position. "There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level," she said. The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications. "The job I've been offered is not using the skills I have," she said. "I just want to use my degree."

'Workforce crisis': key takeaways for graduates battling AI in the jobs market

Recruiter moves to in-person assessments as candidates apply using AI ChatGPT can certainly write your university essay - but will it take your job soon after? Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to fears that the technology will make swathes of the workforce redundant. Graduates are seen as particularly vulnerable because entry-level jobs such as form-filling and basic data entry are strongly associated with the "drudge work" that AI systems - which perform tasks that typically have required human intelligence - could do instead. Over the past two and a half years the availability of such positions has dropped by a third, and last month it was reported that graduates are facing the toughest UK job market since 2018. The Guardian spoke to some of the UK's biggest recruitment agencies and employment experts for their views on the impact of AI on current and future opportunities for those entering the jobs market. Here are six key takeaways from what they said:

Recent college graduates face a new obstacle in finding a job: AI

Alain Sherter is a senior managing editor with CBS News. He covers business, economics, money and workplace issues for CBS MoneyWatch. The rise of generative AI is making it harder for recent college graduates to get a foothold on the corporate ladder as they start their careers. Job listings for the kind of entry-level corporate roles traditionally available to young grads have declined 15%, while the number of applications per job has surged 30%, according to data from Handshake, a career platform geared toward Gen Z workers. Although people fresh out of college often struggle to land entry-level positions in their chosen field, "there are early warning signs" that AI is taking jobs away from the least experienced workers, Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for Americans for Responsible Innovation, told CBS MoneyWatch, noting that "the unemployment rate for recent college graduates being unusually high seems relevant." As of March, the U.S. unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 through 27 was 5.8%, considerably higher than the nation's overall 4% jobless rate at the time, according to the New York Federal Reserve. To be sure, most recent college grads are finding work, Calidas emphasized, adding that the latest job figures point to a "deterioration," not a collapse, in opportunities for young people. Still, "It's tough for students who feel like they have done the right thing their whole lives -- they went into STEM careers or computer science because they expected software hiring to grow and grow, and that may not happen," he said. Just ask Michael Macaluso, 22, who this year earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut. Despite applying for roughly 200 positions, he has yet to land a job in his chosen field. For now, he's working as an assistant pool director at the Lake Isle Country Club in Eastchester, New York, his hometown. "I was told by a lot of people, that I was going to get a job right out of college," he told CBS News' Ali Bauman. "And then all of a sudden, there's no jobs." Experts say that because AI is currently best at the kind of rote, repetitive tasks that are a staple of entry-level work, the very nature of what such roles consist of is likely to change. "The AI piece is becoming more integrated, which is requiring a redefinition of what an entry-level role looks like and the types of skills that might be be needed," Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake, told CBS MoneyWatch. "So it's critical for new graduates to make sure they are exposing themselves to AI and learning how to use it." Over the past two years, there has been a 400% increase in employers using "AI" in job descriptions, according to Handshake. Liya Palagashvili, a labor economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told CBS MoneyWatch that jobs with low barriers to entry are being swallowed by AI. She points to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Chicago, Columbia Business School, Purdue University, and Stanford Graduate School of Business showing that generative AI is weighing on hiring in occupations that require little education, knowledge or training. "Any job requiring lower levels or skills or training, that's where we are seeing a reduction in hiring due to an exposure to generative AI," Palagashvili said. By contrast, the study found that, since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, demand for workers in occupations requiring a higher level of knowledge and training has risen. "So you're seeing a two-segmented market thing going on with ChatGPT having a positive effect on occupations with higher barriers to labor entry, and having a negative effect on occupations that have low barriers to entry," Palagashvili said. "The latest empirical evidence shows hiring is down in low-skilled occupations, but high in those that require a higher skill level." New technologies have always shaped the labor market, snuffing out certain professions while breathing life into new sectors. One difference with the rise of AI that the technology excels at job functions typically associated with white-collar work. The acceleration of AI could push more young people into skilled trades that don't require a high-priced college education, Calidas said. "Since the automation that began in the 1970s, a lot of manual jobs have gone away," he said. "For a few generations, it's been an article of faith that white-collar jobs are more safe, whereas blue-collar work is more precarious. There's been a cultural push toward sending people to college, but it might make more sense to go into the trades."

Recent college graduates face a new obstacle in finding a job: AI

Alain Sherter is a senior managing editor with CBS News. He covers business, economics, money and workplace issues for CBS MoneyWatch. The rise of generative AI is making it harder for recent college graduates to get a foothold on the corporate ladder as they start their careers. Job listings for the kind of entry-level corporate roles traditionally available to young grads have declined 15%, while the number of applications per job has surged 30%, according to data from Handshake, a career platform geared toward Gen Z workers. Although people fresh out of college often struggle to land entry-level positions in their chosen field, "there are early warning signs" that AI is taking jobs away from the least experienced workers, Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit focused on emerging technologies, told CBS MoneyWatch. "The unemployment rate for recent college graduates being unusually high seems relevant," he said. As of March, the U.S. unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 through 27 was 5.8%, considerably higher than the nation's overall 4% jobless rate at the time, according to the New York Federal Reserve. To be sure, most recent college grads are finding work, Calidas emphasized, adding that the latest job figures point to a "deterioration," not a collapse, in opportunities for young people. Still, "It's tough for students who feel like they have done the right thing their whole lives -- they went into STEM careers or computer science because they expected software hiring to grow and grow, and that may not happen," he said. Just ask Michael Macaluso, 22, who this year earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut. Despite applying for roughly 200 positions, he has yet to land a job in his chosen field. For now, he's working as an assistant pool director at the Lake Isle Country Club in Eastchester, New York, his hometown. "I was told by a lot of people, that I was going to get a job right out of college," he told CBS News' Ali Bauman. "And then all of a sudden, there's no jobs." Experts say that because AI is currently best at the kind of rote, repetitive tasks that are a staple of entry-level work, the very nature of what such roles consist of is likely to change. "The AI piece is becoming more integrated, which is requiring a redefinition of what an entry-level role looks like and the types of skills that might be be needed," Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake, told CBS MoneyWatch. "So it's critical for new graduates to make sure they are exposing themselves to AI and learning how to use it." Over the past two years, there has been a 400% increase in employers using "AI" in job descriptions, according to Handshake. Liya Palagashvili, a labor economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told CBS MoneyWatch that jobs with low barriers to entry are being swallowed by AI. She points to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Chicago, Columbia Business School, Purdue University, and Stanford Graduate School of Business showing that generative AI is weighing on hiring in occupations that require little education, knowledge or training. "Any job requiring lower levels or skills or training, that's where we are seeing a reduction in hiring due to an exposure to generative AI," Palagashvili said. By contrast, the study found that, since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, demand for workers in occupations requiring a higher level of knowledge and training has risen. "So you're seeing a two-segmented market thing going on with ChatGPT having a positive effect on occupations with higher barriers to labor entry, and having a negative effect on occupations that have low barriers to entry," Palagashvili said. "The latest empirical evidence shows hiring is down in low-skilled occupations, but high in those that require a higher skill level." New technologies have always shaped the labor market, snuffing out certain professions while breathing life into new sectors. One difference with the rise of AI that the technology excels at job functions typically associated with white-collar work. The acceleration of AI could push more young people into skilled trades that don't require a high-priced college education, Calidas said. "Since the automation that began in the 1970s, a lot of manual jobs have gone away," he said. "For a few generations, it's been an article of faith that white-collar jobs are more safe, whereas blue-collar work is more precarious. There's been a cultural push toward sending people to college, but it might make more sense to go into the trades."

AI Is Coming for College Graduates. We Need to Be Ready.

At 17 years old, I'm supposed to be planning my future: working on my college applications, thinking about an exciting career path and preparing for what should be the best four years of my life ahead at the university of my dreams. Instead, while my high school classmates debate college majors, I'm kept awake at night by the fear that it might all be pointless - that we're preparing for jobs that might not exist in a few years because of lightning-fast advances in artificial intelligence. Welcome to the reality of Generation Z. We're not just choosing a major; we're gambling on whether our dream jobs and our chosen career paths will survive the AI revolution. That revolution isn't just coming - it's here, and my generation is walking straight into the eye of the storm. I don't want to sound like a total alarmist. I'm an AI optimist and believe it could deliver great benefits for mankind - from helping us discover new drugs and cures to reimagining material science and possibly even curing cancer in our lifetime. But government, business and education leaders need to manage the AI transition responsibly to minimize and mitigate the damage it is also likely to cause - especially to my generation. It took steam power, electricity and computing chips several decades each to transform society, but think about how AI has done that in just a few years. Gen Z is entering adulthood during a seismic shift that will fundamentally alter the job market before many of us even land our first real jobs. From 1990 to 2024, recent college graduates consistently had lower unemployment rates than the general workforce; today, the opposite is true. Recent college graduates now face close to a 6% unemployment rate, compared to the general unemployment rate of 4%. This abrupt change has tracked with rapid developments in generative AI, which have allowed AI systems to perform many of the entry-level tasks that companies have traditionally assigned to new graduates. In fact, AI will soon have the capability to do 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. And the technology is getting better by the day. Companies have historically hired and invested in entry-level workers to build their future workforce. If they're now using AI instead, where does that leave my generation? Not only will entry-level jobs disappear, but certain groups will be hit harder. According to a study conducted in 2023, 80% of women in the U.S. workforce are in occupations that are especially vulnerable to AI automation, compared with 60% of men. My classmates who are dreaming of careers in law, media, graphic design and software engineering, to name just a few, are preparing for careers in which many key tasks will likely be replaced by AI. We didn't choose to live through this once-in-a-century transformation, but here we are. We need policies that give us time to adapt, education systems that prepare us for reality, and employers who can see our potential. We've already lived through a global pandemic that upended our academic experiences, and now we're being told to build our futures on quicksand. I'm not asking to slow down technological progress, but Gen Z needs a voice in what comes next. The World Economic Forum predicts that, by 2030, an estimated 92 million jobs including many administrative, analysts and operational jobs are expected to be displaced by AI, while 170 million new AI-powered roles such as specialized prompt engineers, AI ethics officers and AI analysts are projected to emerge. But here's the catch: Currently 77% of new AI jobs will require master's degrees, and 18% will require doctoral degrees, according to FinalRound, an AI-powered career coaching engine. Instead of worrying just about getting into college or technical school, does our generation need to be planning - and saving - for advanced degrees? I see my classmates stress about SAT scores and college rankings, and I wonder if we're optimizing for the wrong things. Maybe instead of asking "What do I want to be when I grow up?" we should be asking "What skills will still be valuable when AI can do most things?" Generation Z aren't just statistics. We're the future workforce, the future leaders, parents and citizens who will shape the world in the coming decades. Decisions made today will determine whether AI becomes a job-killer or the most transformative opportunity for inclusive prosperity in American history. The clock is ticking. My generation is anxiously watching as we prepare to join the workforce. We need responsible leaders in Silicon Valley, Washington and at universities and vocational schools to help guide us through this historic change. Akshay Bharath is a rising 12th grader at Briar Woods High School in Ashburn, Virginia, who hopes to become an entrepreneur focused on making technical education accessible to all through AI.

Which workers will AI hurt most: The young or the experienced? - The Economic Times

AI is reshaping the white-collar workforce, with debate over whether junior or senior employees are most at risk. While entry-level roles are easier to automate, experienced workers with high salaries and slower AI adoption may also face displacement. Companies are increasingly using AI to boost productivity and cut mid-level roles.When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote last month that he expected the company's use of artificial intelligence to "reduce our total workforce" over the next few years, it confirmed the fear among many workers that AI would replace them. The fear was reinforced two weeks later when Microsoft said it was laying off about 9,000 people, roughly 4% of its workforce. That AI is poised to displace white-collar workers is indisputable. But what kind of workers, exactly? Jassy's announcement landed in the middle of a debate over just this question. Some experts argue that AI is most likely to affect novice workers, whose tasks are generally simplest and therefore easiest to automate. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, recently told Axios that the technology could cannibalize half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years. An uptick in the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has aggravated this concern, even if it doesn't prove that AI is the cause of their job-market struggles. But other captains of the AI industry have taken the opposite view, arguing that younger workers are likely to benefit from AI and that experienced workers will ultimately be more vulnerable. In an interview at a New York Times event in late June, Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI, suggested that the technology could pose problems for "a class of worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine in a certain way of doing things." The ultimate answer to this question will have vast implications. If entry-level jobs are most at risk, it could require a rethinking of how we educate college students, or even the value of college itself. And if older workers are most at risk, it could lead to economic and even political instability as large-scale layoffs become a persistent feature of the labor market. David Furlonger, a vice president at the research firm Gartner who helps oversee its survey of CEOs, has considered the implications if AI displaces more experienced workers. "What are those people going to do? How will they be funded? What is the impact on tax revenue?" he said. "I imagine governments are thinking about that." Is AI making better managers? Economists and other experts who study AI often draw different conclusions about whom it's more likely to displace. Zooming in on the fields that have deployed AI most widely thus far tends to paint a dire picture for entry-level workers. Data from ADP, the payroll processing firm, shows that in computer-related fields, employment for workers with less than two years of tenure peaked in 2023 and is down about 20% to 25% since then. There is a similar pattern among customer service representatives, who are increasingly reliant on AI as well. Over the same period, employment in these industries has increased for workers with two or more years of job tenure, according to Ruyu Chen, a Stanford University researcher who analyzed the data. Other studies point in a similar direction, if in a roundabout way. In early 2023, Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT, which software developers there relied on to help them code. A team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and Chapman University compared the change in the productivity of Italian coders with the productivity of coders in France and Portugal, which did not ban the software, to isolate the impact of ChatGPT. While the study did not look at job loss, it did find that the AI tool had transformed the jobs of midlevel workers in more favorable ways than the jobs of entry-level workers. According to the researchers, the junior coders used AI to complete their tasks somewhat faster; the experienced coders often used it to benefit their teams more broadly. For example, the AI helped midlevel coders review the work of other coders and suggest improvements, and to contribute to projects in languages they didn't know. "When people are really good at things, what they end up doing is helping other people as opposed to working on their own projects," said Sarah Bana, one of the paper's authors, adding that the AI essentially reinforced this tendency. Bana said the paper's result suggested that AI would prompt companies to hire fewer junior coders (because fewer would be needed to complete entry-level tasks) but more midlevel coders (because AI amplified their value to their whole team). On the other hand, Danielle Li, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the use of AI in the workplace, said there were scenarios in which AI could undermine higher-skilled workers more than entry-level workers. The reason is that it can, in effect, untether valuable skills from the humans who have traditionally possessed them. For instance, you may no longer have to be an engineer to code, or a lawyer to write a legal brief. "That state of the world is not good for experienced workers," she said. "You're being paid for the rarity of your skill, and what happens is that AI allows the skill to live outside of people." Li said AI would not necessarily be good for less experienced workers, either. But she speculated that the uptick in unemployment for new college graduates resulted from employers' expectations that they will need fewer workers overall in the age of AI, not just fewer novice workers. An overall hiring slowdown can have a bigger impact on workers right out of college, since they don't have a job to begin with. Robert Plotkin, a partner in a small law firm specializing in intellectual property, said AI had not affected his firm's need for lower-skilled workers like paralegals, who format the documents that his firm submits to the patent office. But his firm now uses roughly half as many contract lawyers, including some with several years of experience, as it used a few years ago, before the availability of generative AI, he added. These more senior lawyers draft patent applications for clients, which Plotkin then reviews and asks them to revise. But he can often draft applications more efficiently with the help of an AI assistant, except when the patent involves a field of science or technology that he is unfamiliar with. "I've become very efficient at using AI as a tool to help me draft applications in a way that's reduced our need for contract lawyers," Plotkin said. Some of the companies at the cutting edge of AI adoption appear to have made similar calculations, laying off experienced employees rather than simply hiring fewer entry-level workers. Google, Meta and Amazon have all done layoffs since 2022. Two months before its most recent layoff announcement, Microsoft laid off 6,000 employees, many of them software developers, while the July layoffs included many middle managers. "Anything that is administrative, spreadsheet-related, where there's an email trail, a document-management type activity, AI should be able to perform fairly easily, freeing up time for managers to do more mentoring," said Furlonger, the analyst at Gartner, whose survey recently included questions about AI. "CEOs are implying in the data that we don't need as many of them as we did previously." The value of inexperience Gil Luria, an equity analyst who covers Microsoft for the investment bank D.A. Davidson, said one reason for layoffs was that companies like Microsoft and Google were cutting costs to prop up their profit margins as they invested billions in chips and data centers to develop AI. But another reason is that software engineers are susceptible to replacement by AI at all skill levels -- including experienced engineers who make a large salary but are reluctant to embrace the technology. Microsoft "can do math quickly -- see who's adding value, who's overpaid, who's not overpaid, who's adapting well," Luria said. "There are senior people who have figured out how to get leverage out of AI and senior people who are insistent that AI can't write code." Harper Reed, CEO of 2389 Research, which is building autonomous AI agents to help companies perform a variety of tasks, said the combination of higher salaries and a reluctance to embrace AI was likely to put the jobs of experienced coders at risk. "How you decrease cost is not by firing the cheapest employees you have," Reed said. "You take the cheapest employee and make them worth the expensive employee." A number of studies have suggested that this is possible. In a recent study by researchers at Microsoft and three universities, an AI coding assistant appeared to increase the productivity of junior developers substantially more than it increased the productivity of their more experienced colleagues. Reed said that from a purely financial perspective, it would increasingly make sense for companies to hire junior employees who used AI to do what was once midlevel work, a handful of senior employees to oversee them and almost no middle-tier employees. That, he said, is essentially how his company is structured.