Why AI will undermine career advancement for many young workers

Labor and AI experts say companies are replacing entry-level jobs with artificial intelligence, and in the process upending traditional routes to career advancement for many young white-collar workers.

New entrants to the job market typically work in menial jobs with relatively low stakes. For example, consider research or data entry jobs. They spend years learning skills while working alongside more experienced colleagues, eventually becoming experts in their own right and rising to managerial positions.

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

But the economy no longer invests in expert-novice relationships to the same extent, Bean said, as companies move down the entry-level ranks in favor of AI to increase efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits.

A week’s worth of reports that once required five people may now take an hour with AI, a value proposition that businesses and their customers love, he said.

“But what this effectively means is that junior analysts, junior bankers, junior educators, they no longer have a chance to participate in this job because it’s voluntary,” Bean said.

As a result, it becomes harder to get promoted, which could cause problems for companies and the economy as a whole in the years ahead, experts say.

“Training wheels for your career”

The number of entry-level job openings in the U.S. fell by 35% from January 2023 to June 2025, according to a recent analysis by labor research firm Rebellio Lab.

While AI did not explain the entire decline, it was a major factor, especially in entry-level jobs where “exposure to AI is high,” wrote Lisa Simon, chief economist at Rebellio.

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

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

“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 announced layoffs this year, and AI is at least part of the reason.

A 2025 study co-authored by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and Yale University found that if AI were able to perform most tasks in a given job, the proportion of people in a company who would fill those roles would decline by about 14%.

“Schools are not the way to make senior employees,” Bean says. “It’s about working with people who know more and learning by doing. And that’s where most of our skills come from.”

In the United States, employers expect generative AI to disrupt 35% of workers’ core skills by 2030, a “substantial” percentage, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work report released in January.

The report found that while most employers plan to prioritize improving the skill level of their employees, 40% of employers worldwide said they would cut staff if employee skills became less important.

“How on earth can young people get ‘Level 3’ training if they haven’t completed Levels 1 and 2?” said Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in the impact of generative AI on jobs and workers.

Possibility of “collapse” of talent pipeline

Businesses may also suffer losses.

Utilizing AI may save money now, but experts say companies will face problems later if they don’t have enough people to hire for managerial roles.

For example, if a company doesn’t have skilled programmers, what will happen in a few years? Kinder asked. What to do if a law firm doesn’t have a lawyer who knows how to argue in court and make legal decisions? What to do if a consulting company doesn’t have a consultant who is readily available to talk to clients?

“In three to five years, businesses, organizations, and professions that relied on the (career) ladder to stay afloat will be faced with new and vexing problems,” said Bean, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Cleanup is always harder than prevention.”

Competitors themselves may lack early talent to promote, Kinder said, and companies may be reluctant to hire or train employees for fear that competitors will poach them later. That concern may lead companies to rely more on AI instead of putting resources into training, she said.

“If everyone did that, the entire talent pipeline would start to collapse and employers in many sectors would be in trouble in a few years,” Kinder said.

According to the World Economic Forum, around 42% of global employers expect their talent pool to decline between 2025 and 2030.

“It’s not all doomsday”

Of course, there are still employment opportunities and career advancement opportunities for young people, Kinder said.

“It’s not all doomsday,” she said.

According to the World Economic Forum, trends in AI and information processing technology are expected to create 11 million jobs and displace another 9 million globally, with a net benefit of about 2 million. The report does not reveal the relative seniority of jobs gained or lost.

Experts say college students and new employees can make themselves more marketable to future employers and recruiters by learning about AI, even if they don’t work in the technology industry.

According to the Lightcast report, by 2024, the majority (51%) of job postings seeking AI skills will be outside of technology fields.

One important step for young workers is to learn “practical AI fluency,” Bean said.

Employers “are in dire need” of workers who can demonstrate a high level of initiative and skill with AI, he said.

Overall, non-tech jobs requiring generative AI skills increased ninefold from 2022 to 2024, reaching more than 29,000 jobs, according to Lightcast.

“Let’s actually use AI to solve real-world problems and do things we never dreamed we could do,” Bean said. “You’re going to waste a ton of time. You’re going to struggle. You’re going to fail. You’re going to create something you never thought you could do. It allows you to critique technology from within and understand how and where it’s relevant from your perspective and from your life.”

Lands of Jobs for the Future said young workers can become more “bankable” by learning how to use certain AI platforms (such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini).

This will allow workers to combine human skills, such as strategic thinking and interpersonal interaction, that AI lacks, with skills that AI excels in, such as data processing, he said. This combination can produce powerful results, she said.

“It’s really incumbent on you to start educating yourself,” she said. “It helps you jump over broken rungs on the career ladder.