The Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder is Eroding
This article was posted in HRD (Human Resources Director) on September 25, 2025
For decades, careers have resembled ladders.
You begin with the “grunt work” - analyzing spreadsheets, proofreading briefs, researching markets, shadowing senior staff. Those low rungs weren’t glamorous, but they were essential. They provided the practice ground where graduates turned theory into experience, slowly climbing upward.
But with AI now embedded across workflows, the first rungs are splintering. Tasks once handed to interns or new grads are being absorbed by AI Agents. The career ladder still exists—but the bottom is missing.
This isn’t just a problem for young professionals. It’s a structural threat to how organizations cultivate future leaders.
The Great Vanishing Act
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. Just last week, Salesforce laid off 4,000 staff as Marc Benioff comments “I need less heads with AI”. Microsoft admits that AI now writes 30% of its code. Duolingo requires managers to prove they can't automate work before hiring anyone new. IBM replaced hundreds of HR workers with AI agents. Meanwhile, internship postings have hit six-year lows, and job openings requiring less than one year of experience are quietly declining across white-collar sectors.
This isn't the dramatic robot takeover that science fiction promised.
Instead, it's a gradual hollowing-out of the work that used to teach young professionals how to be professional. The data analysis, content drafting, research summaries, and basic coding tasks that once gave graduates their first taste of real work are now handled by tools that don't need training, feedback, or career development.
But here's what leaders are missing: those "menial" tasks were never just busywork.
They were apprenticeships disguised as assignments: the professional equivalent of learning scales before playing symphonies.
When we automate away the practice rounds, we don't just eliminate inefficiency; we eliminate the very pathway through which expertise develops.
Universities Teaching Yesterday's Skills for Tomorrow's Jobs
The irony is brutal. While companies race to embed AI into every workflow, most universities have done the opposite - treating AI tools like contraband and banning students from learning the very technology reshaping their future careers.
It's like teaching aspiring pilots to navigate by stars while airlines convert to GPS.
This educational malpractice creates a vicious cycle. Students graduate without fluency in AI, making them less valuable to employers who've already integrated these tools.
Meanwhile, the work they're trained to do (the analytical heavy lifting, the first-draft writing, the data processing) has been handed off to algorithms. They're skilled for jobs that no longer exist, and unskilled for the jobs that do.
Universities that continue to treat AI as academic dishonesty rather than professional necessity are sending graduates into a job market like soldiers trained for cavalry charges in the age of machine guns.
The Talent Pipeline Runs Dry
The consequences extend far beyond individual career disappointment. Companies automating entry-level work today are starving their own talent pipelines for tomorrow.
“Today’s entry-level automation creates tomorrow’s leadership shortage. ”
Consider what happens when you remove the first rung: aspiring professionals can't start climbing, which means they can't reach the middle rungs, which means the top rungs eventually empty out.
Today's entry-level automation creates tomorrow's leadership shortage.
The irony is that many of the same companies celebrating AI's ability to eliminate junior roles will later complain about the lack of experienced mid-level talent.
This isn't just an HR problem, it's a strategic vulnerability.
Organizations that fail to cultivate human talent alongside their AI capabilities will find themselves with sophisticated tools but no one qualified to wield them strategically.
Our imperative to rebuild
The solution requires deliberately reconstructing entry-level experiences for the AI era, creating roles that combine human judgment with AI capabilities rather than simply automating humans away.
We need to redesign jobs with purpose, teaching graduates to work with AI as a power tool while ensuring they still learn fundamentals. Most importantly, we must invest in the soft skills that remain uniquely human: creativity, judgment, communication, and ethical reasoning.
Universities must stop treating AI literacy as optional and start embedding it across disciplines. Employers must resist the temptation to eliminate all entry-level roles and instead reimagine them as human-AI collaboration opportunities.
The companies that figure this out first will gain a massive competitive advantage: a workforce that's both AI-fluent and deeply skilled in the human capabilities that AI can't replicate.
The Choice Before Us
We stand at a crossroads. Down one path lies the efficient elimination of entry-level work, creating immediate productivity gains while slowly strangling our talent development. Down the other lies the harder but wiser choice: deliberately designing career pathways that combine human development with AI capabilities.
The bottom rung of the career ladder is eroding whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is whether we'll build a new one strong enough to support the next generation - or watch them fall through the cracks we've created in our rush toward automation.
The future belongs to organizations that view talent development not as a cost to be optimized away, but as a strategic investment in human-AI collaboration. They'll be the ones with the skilled leaders necessary to navigate an AI-powered world.
The ladder is crumbling. It's time to build a better one.
About the Author
Jay Kiew is the founder of The Change Fluency Co, providing a unique perspective on change management that bridges strategic consulting with practical application. With over 15 years of experience in strategy consulting and innovation consulting, Jay is a world-renowned keynote speaker on change, innovation and futurism.
His unique approach to change management consulting has helped organizations develop adaptive capacity that translates challenges into opportunities - the hallmark of truly effective transformation leadership.
