Why AI may kill career advancement for many young workers

Companies are replacing entry-level jobs with artificial intelligence — and, in the process, are upending the traditional route to career advancement for many young, white-collar workers, according to labor and AI experts.

Typically, new entrants to the job market do grunt work with relatively low stakes — think research or data entry jobs, for example. They acquire skills over years while working alongside more seasoned colleagues, ultimately becoming experts themselves and climbing into managerial roles.

This “expert-novice” approach to skill-building has existed for 160,000 years, said Matt Beane, author of “The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines” and an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But the economy isn’t investing in the expert-novice relationship to the same degree anymore, as companies whittle down their entry-level ranks in favor of AI to boost efficiency, cut costs and pad their bottom line, Beane said.

A one-week report that would have once required five people might now take one hour with AI, a value proposition companies and their customers love, he said.

“What that practically means, though, is that that junior analyst, junior banker, junior educator doesn’t get a shot at participating in the work anymore because they are optional,” Beane said.

That, in turn, makes it harder to get promoted — a dynamic that could pose problems for companies and the broader economy a few years from now, experts said.

‘Training wheels for a career’

Postings for entry-level jobs in the U.S. plunged 35% from January 2023 to June 2025, according to a recent analysis by labor research firm Revelio Labs.

AI doesn’t explain the whole decline but was a key contributor, especially for entry-level jobs that are “highly AI-exposed,” wrote Lisa Simon, Revelio chief economist.

They include entry-level jobs like data engineers, software developers, customer service and compliance roles, financial advisors and risk analysts, according to the report.

“Early-career jobs are the training wheels for a career,” said Alison Lands, vice president of employer mobilization at Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit.

“Data suggests that AI is disrupting the traditional career ladder as we know it,” Lands said.

Klarna, Duolingo and Salesforce are among the companies that have announced headcount reductions this year, at least partly because of AI.

When AI can perform most tasks for a specific job, the share of people in that role within a company falls by about 14%, according to a 2025 study co-authored by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and Yale University.

“The way you make a senior employee is not through school,” Beane said. “It’s by doing the job alongside someone who knows more, and you learn by doing. And that’s where the bulk of our skill comes from.”

In the U.S., employers expect generative AI to disrupt 35% of workers’ core skills by 2030, a “significant” share, according to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report, published in January.

While most employers said they plan to prioritize raising their workforce’s skill levels, 40% of employers globally said they’d cut staff as their skills become less relevant, the report found.

“How in the world are young people going to get trained up to come in at a ‘Level Three’ if they haven’t done Level One and Level Two?” said Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution whose research specializes in the impact of generative AI on work and workers.

The talent pipeline could ‘collapse’

Companies stand to lose, too.

They might save money today by using AI, but find themselves in trouble later if there’s a dearth of people to hire into managerial roles, experts said.

What happens in a few years, for example, if a company doesn’t have any seasoned coders? Kinder asked. If a law firm doesn’t have lawyers who know how to argue in court and make legal judgments? If a consulting firm doesn’t have consultants who are ready to talk to clients?

“In three to five years, whatever firms, organizations, occupations were counting on that [career] ladder continuing to work are going to face a new nasty set of problems,” said Beane, the UC Santa Barbara professor. “Cleanup is always harder than prevention.”

Companies may be reluctant to hire and train their workers out of fear that competitors will poach them later, since competitors themselves may have a scarcity of early-career talent to promote, Kinder said. That fear might drive companies to lean on AI even more, instead of putting resources toward training, she said.

“If everyone does that, the entire pipeline of talent starts to collapse and, in a few years, employers in lots of sectors are going to find themselves in trouble,” Kinder said.

About 42% of global employers expect talent availability to decline between 2025 and 2030, according to the World Economic Forum.

‘Not all doomsday’

Of course, there are still job opportunities and career growth available to young people, Kinder said.

“It’s not all doomsday,” she said.

Globally, trends in AI and information processing technologies are expected to create 11 million jobs and displace 9 million others — for a net gain of roughly 2 million, according to the World Economic Forum. The report doesn’t specify the relative seniority of the jobs gained or lost.

College students and early-career workers can make themselves more marketable to prospective employers and hiring managers by learning AI, even if they don’t work in tech, experts said.

In 2024, the majority of job postings, 51%, that asked for AI skills were outside the tech sector, according to a Lightcast report.

Among the important steps for young workers is learning “practical AI fluency,” said Beane.

Employers “desperately need” workers who can show high agency and skill with AI, he said.

Overall, job postings that require generative AI skills in non-tech roles increased ninefold from 2022 to 2024, to more than 29,000, according to Lightcast.

“Get your hands dirty with AI on real problems, trying to deal with stuff that you would never have even dreamed you could do before,” Beane said. “You’ll waste a ton of time. You’ll struggle. You’ll fail. You’ll produce things you didn’t think you possibly could. That gives you the ability to critique the tech from within and understand how and where it’s relevant from your point of view and your life.”

Learning how to use specific AI platforms — ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, for example — will make young workers more “bankable,” said Lands of Jobs for the Future.

This will help workers pair the human skills that AI lacks — like strategic thinking and interpersonal interaction — with ones in which AI excels, like data processing, she said. The combination can yield a powerful result, she said.

“It’s really incumbent on you to start educating yourself,” she said. “It will help you leapfrog that broken rung on the career ladder.