Under pressure from AI, the bottom rung of the career ladder is breaking

Aneesh Raman, I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. NYTimes, May 19, 2025.

There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the entry-level jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers. Uncertainty around tariffs and global trade are only likely to accelerate that pressure, just as millions of 2025 graduates enter the work force.

We saw what happened in the 1980s when our manufacturing sector steeply declined. Now it is our office workers who are staring down the same kind of technological and economic disruption.

Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, A.I. chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates.

These changes coincide with a shift appearing in the latest employment numbers. The unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30 percent since September 2022, compared with about 18 percent for all workers. And while LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, a measure of job and career confidence across nearly 500,000 professionals, is hitting new lows amid general uncertainty, members of Generation Z are more pessimistic about their futures than any other age group out there. Meanwhile, in our recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63 percent agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.

Inequality:

Also concerning is the potential for widening inequality in the job market. If entry-level roles evaporate, those lacking elite networks or privileged backgrounds will face even steeper barriers to finding their footing in the workplace. Plus, the fallout from large-scale economic shifts ripples through entire communities. When manufacturing jobs vanished across America’s heartland, the result wasn’t just lost income but also social and political upheaval.

Redesign entry-level jobs:

Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers. But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by A.I. At the accounting and consulting firm KPMG, recent graduates are now handling tax assignments that used to be reserved for employees with three or more years of experience, thanks to A.I. tools. And at Macfarlanes, early-career lawyers are now tasked with interpreting complex contracts that once fell to their more seasoned colleagues. [...]

For generations, entry-level positions have served as professional steppingstones where new graduates could safely learn under the watchful eye of seasoned managers. [...] Fixing entry-level work is the first step to fixing all work. Because all our jobs are going to come up against this same wave of change sooner or later.

There's more at the link.