The future of tech will be paved by the generations following after us, as it always has been and will be. Our graduates, our interns, our apprentices – all of them pivotal and pertinent in the role of advancing the tech landscape as we know it.
However, where do these bright-eyed newcomers go when there are no jobs for them, where their jobs are down 67%? What does a future that prioritizes the passions of our entry-level workers and ensures companies are utilizing artificial intelligence for good look like?
Jobs Are Down 67%
“The White Collar Recession is here,” wrote Vernon Keenan, a senior tech analyst on LinkedIn.
“Unlike recessions past, GDP is rising, profits are at record highs, and the stock market is roaring. But professional job seekers – new graduates, junior lawyers, young engineers – are finding locked doors.”
The bigger picture is only getting clearer and clearer; some of the world’s top economists are predicting a full-blown US recession in the next year, and the tech industry continues to grapple with changes such as shifting budgets, cutthroat profit chasing, and the unstoppable force that is the rise of AI.
The debate over whether AI is taking away jobs and replacing humans continues to evolve, and although the impacts of this are being felt across the different employment ranks, it is hitting no one harder than entry-level talent.
According to the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, there has been a 13% drop in employment for 22-25 year-olds in AI-exposed jobs since late 2022, and entry-level tech postings have been down 67% in the last two years.
Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford University, says that we can observe the most poignant changes occurring in late 2022 around the time that ChatGPT was unveiled.
“This isn’t just an employment problem – it’s a skill formation crisis,” he said. “By hollowing out the entry-level, companies are cannibalizing their own leadership pipeline. The junior analyst not hired today is a future CFO who cannot be promoted tomorrow.”
Augment vs. Automate
Although we should not shy away from the fact that entry-level tech jobs are being diminished, it is important to understand why and how, and the reasons fall into two primary categories: augmentation and automation.
Stanford’s report on how AI is impacting these entry-level tech jobs concluded that employment declines are “concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor.” This essentially means that in roles where AI is being used to complete tasks instead of a person, the lower the chance of that job being available to an entry-level employee.
This “augment” vs. “automate” argument has been significant since AI started entering the workforce, and by now, you should be able to tell which companies are interested in either method.
Companies like Klarna and Duolingo initially ventured in favour of the automation side rather than the augmentation side, with criticized results. Other companies like IBM and Accenture aim to work towards augmentation – which can be seen in their tools – and are still hiring for entry-level positions despite readjustments due to AI scaling.
What About Salesforce?
Although Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has insisted that AI will enhance and not replace the human workforce (augmentation), questions as to how valid this statement is have been circling since Benioff announced 4,000 supposed job cuts.
Amarjit Dhillon, an Advisory Council Member of the Harvard Business Review, recently took to LinkedIn to express that these layoffs marked “one of the dramatic examples of AI-driven workforce automation by a major tech company.”
“[This provides] concrete evidence that AI can replace human workers rather than augment them,” he wrote. “The move signals a fundamental shift in corporate operations and challenges the tech industry’s narrative about AI creating rather than eliminating jobs.”
“[It also represents] roughly 5% of Salesforce’s total workforce of 76,453 employees and provides concrete evidence of AI’s impact on corporate headcount.”
Although these particular layoffs are arguably not fully attributed to AI automation, it does align with forecasts of the future effects of AI in the workplace.
Predictions for the impact of AI on the future of entry-level work are not particularly favorable – EFMD Global reported that half of entry-level jobs could vanish by 2030, and the World Economic Forum predicts that there will be over 83M job losses globally by 2027.
There is still work to be done if or before this happens, and that work needs to happen now.
Finding and Protecting Your Job
It might be easy to assume that in order to find and protect your tech job, it’s just a matter of working out whether the job and company are centered around automation or augmentation. However, as we have seen, a company could have good intentions – or at least claim to – and instead opt for a more profit-friendly option.
The difficult truth is that ultimately, no job is truly safe from layoffs or AI disruption, but there are ways of future-proofing that can be done from today.
At its heart, it’s all about considering which tasks within jobs are more susceptible to automation vs. augmentation, and how this knowledge can inform educational and career choices.
A few of these strategies are:
- Keep learning: By now, there is no denying that learning AI is a necessity, but it’s important to make sure that that learning is continuous. Make sure you’re updating your skills and knowledge to stay ahead in your field, including taking courses, earning certifications, and getting as much hands-on experience as possible.
- Focus on developing human skills: AI will never be human, despite what anyone may say, and where an AI will never surpass a human is with “human skills” – emotional intelligence, empathy, and adaptability. Those interpersonal skills will set apart even the most analytical data work or the most thorough consulting.
- Embrace collaboration with AI: AI isn’t going anywhere, but neither are you. Developing your AI skills – specifically using AI tools to make you a more efficient worker or complete tasks faster/on a larger scale – will make it easier for you to prove that the efficiency comes from the work you can do with AI.
Final Thoughts
These figures should incite worry in the tech community, but at the very least, they should stoke a desire to change the market for the better.
Without entry-level talent in the space, the future of tech faces the possibility of becoming distinctly detached, outdated, inaccessible, and possibly even lacking the human touch.
Although the very machines that drive this industry remain at the heart of it, it will always be the generation of tomorrow that will keep the ship running.
