A new report from SignalFire points to a shocking 50% drop in new job starts. This negative trend mainly impacts those with less than one year of post-graduate work experience, based on a year to year comparison from 2019 through 2024. This dropoff is felt across all of their key business functions … sales, marketing, engineering, recruiting and HR, operations, design, finance, and legal. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and permeate the job market, experts express concern that the traditional career ladder is being fundamentally altered.
Those results are released at a time when college graduates are having a hard time finding jobs. Heather Doshay, a leading expert in workforce trends, notes that the removal of entry-level positions raises critical questions about the transfer of institutional knowledge and opportunities for upward advancement within organizations. “The bottom rung is disappearing, but that has the potential to uplevel everyone,” she stated.
The implications of this trend are profound. AI is already automating some of the most common and lowest-paid jobs. Consequently, the new default standard for filling these positions should involve more skills than at any time in recent history. Graduates will have to learn foundational skills on their own to continue to stack up against the future of work.
Walmart’s leadership Doug McMillon, the enormously successful CEO of Walmart, worked his way up the ladder. It all started for him with a summer gig—unloading trucks. The more AI grows, the less likely these pathways will be available. Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire, points to a fundamental shift in the org chart. Among other things, he took note of how this trend is changing companies’ talent recruitment.
The ladder is not broken — it’s simply being swapped out for something that appears a whole lot more flat. Doshay focused on the opportunity to shift organizations into a new paradigm. This new workforce model emphasizes adaptability and cross-functional skill sets rather than a linear, step-wise advancement through fixed role descriptions.
Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, predicts even more radical changes than Li’s forecast. He warns, “If we continue racing ahead with totally unregulated AI, we’ll first see a massive wealth and power concentration from workers to those who control the AI, and then to the machines themselves as their owners lose control over them.” His predictions highlight the need more than ever for inclusive, forward-looking regulatory frameworks that would shield workers from a rapidly automated workforce.
Anders Humlum is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago. As to predicting AI’s long-term effect on the labor market, he notes that we are still in speculative territory. He argues that generative AI tools will soon be able to outsmart even the best efforts of much of our entry-level white-collar workforce. Significant time is needed for workflow changes and for humans to adjust to new capabilities.
“Historically, technological advancements have not harmed employment rates in the long run, but there are short-term impacts along the way,” Doshay noted. The immediate effects of these changes could be particularly severe for new graduates entering the workforce in 2024, 2025, and 2026. Doshay expresses concern for this vulnerable group: “My heart goes out to the new grads of 2024, 2025, and 2026, as they are entering during a time of uncertainty.”
Here’s the good news — employers can help bridge the skills gap. Second, they should aggressively incentivize education and training programs to help workers better leverage AI and other new, workplace-changing technologies. Humlum contends that balance will be essential as institutions work to adapt to an environment that is quickly becoming shaped by what AI can do.
Doshay adds that recent graduates must leverage their familiarity with AI tools to position themselves as desirable candidates in this new environment. “When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills, new grads were well-positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is,” she explained.
“The key will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers,” Doshay concluded.
Needless to say, companies are scrambling to catch up with this new generative AI reality. Thought leaders agree that understanding these shifts are key to success for employers and the incoming workforce. The career ladder isn’t irreparably shattered; we hope that’s not the case indeed.