Why AI may kill career advancement for many young workers

Companies are replacing entry-level jobs with AI, disrupting the traditional path to career advancement for many young, white-collar workers in the process, according to workforce and AI experts.

Typically, new entrants to the job market do relatively low-risk jobs; consider research or data entry jobs, for example. Over the years, they gain skills by working with more experienced colleagues, eventually becoming experts themselves and rising to management roles.

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

But Beane said the economy is no longer as invested in the expert-novice relationship as companies drop their entry-level rankings in favor of AI to increase efficiency, reduce costs and increase their profitability.

A weekly report that used to require five people can now take an hour with AI, a value proposition that companies and their customers love, he said.

“What this means in practice is that the junior analyst, the junior banker, the junior educator, no longer have the opportunity to participate in the study because they are optional,” Beane said.

This makes it harder to get promoted, a dynamic that could spell trouble for companies and the broader economy a few years down the line, experts said.

‘Training wheels for career’

Entry-level job postings in the US dropped 35% from January 2023 to June 2025. based on One final analysis by workforce research firm Revelio Labs.

Revelio chief economist Lisa Simon wrote that AI doesn’t explain the entire decline, but it is a significant contributor, especially for entry-level jobs that are “exposed to high levels of AI.”

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

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

“Data shows that AI is disrupting traditional career paths as we know them,” Lands said.

Klarna, Duolingo and Salesforce are among the companies that have announced headcount reductions this year, at least in part due to artificial intelligence.

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

“The way to become a senior employee is not through school,” Beane said. “It’s about doing the work with someone who knows more, and you learn by doing. And that’s where a lot of our skill comes from.”

In the US, employers expect productive AI to impact 35% of workers’ core skills by 2030; This is a “significant” share. World Economic Forum Future of Jobs reportIt was published in January.

While most employers said they planned to prioritize raising the skill levels of their workforce, 40 percent of employers worldwide said they would lay off staff due to skills becoming obsolete, according to the report.

“If young people have not completed Levels One and Two, how will they be trained to move on to ‘Level Three’?” Molly Kinder, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution whose research specializes in the impact of generative artificial intelligence on work and workers, said:

Talent pipeline ‘could collapse’

Companies also stand to lose.

Experts said they could save money using AI today, but could run into trouble later if there is a shortage of people to hire for management roles.

For example, what happens in a few years if a company doesn’t have experienced coders? Kinder asked. What if a law firm doesn’t have lawyers who know how to argue in court and make legal rulings? What if a consulting firm doesn’t have advisors ready to talk to clients?

“Within three to five years, whatever firms, organizations and professions rely on it will [career] “Cleanup is always harder than prevention,” said Beane, a UC Santa Barbara professor.

Kinder said companies may be reluctant to hire and train employees for fear that competitors will poach them later because competitors themselves may have a shortage of early career talent to promote. He said this fear could push companies to rely more on artificial intelligence instead of devoting resources to training.

“If everyone does this, the entire talent pipeline will start to collapse and within a few years employers in many industries will be in trouble,” Kinder said.

According to the World Economic Forum, approximately 42 percent of global employers expect talent availability to decrease between 2025 and 2030.

‘It’s not all doomsday’

Of course, job opportunities and career development for young people are still available, Kinder said.

“Not everything is doomsday,” he said.

According to the World Economic Forum, globally, trends in artificial intelligence and computing technologies are expected to create 11 million jobs and 9 million to lose their jobs; This means a net gain of approximately 2 million. The report does not specify the relative seniority of jobs gained or lost.

Experts said college students and early-career workers can make themselves more marketable to potential employers and hiring managers by learning artificial intelligence, even if they don’t work in the technology field.

The majority of job postings seeking AI skills in 2024 (51%) were outside the technology sector. According to the Lightcast report.

One key step for young workers is learning “practical AI fluency,” Beane said.

Employers “desperately need” workers who can demonstrate high levels of agency and skill in AI, he said.

Overall, job postings requiring productive 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 as you try to tackle things you never imagined you could do before,” Beane said. “You’ll waste a lot of time. You’ll struggle. You’ll fail. You’ll probably produce things you didn’t think you could do. This gives you the ability to critique technology from the inside and understand how and where it’s relevant to your perspective and your life.”

Lands of Jobs for the Future said learning how to use specific AI platforms (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) will make young workers more “trustworthy.”

This will help workers match human skills that AI lacks, such as strategic thinking and interpersonal interaction, with skills that AI excels at, such as data processing, he said. He said the combination could produce a strong result.

“It’s really your responsibility to start educating yourself,” he said. “This will help you get over the broken rung on the career ladder.