Climbing the Ladder When the Rungs Are Moving

While AI might not be taking all the jobs, it is reshaping the career ladder for many graduates.

The headlines keep coming: “AI will wipe out entry-level jobs.” “White-collar bloodbath ahead.” You’ve probably seen them. Your students almost certainly have.

But as I’ve been saying for a while now, the reality is more nuanced than the hype and hysteria suggest. Yes, things are changing. But the biggest shift isn’t some distant robot apocalypse. It’s a more immediate question: how will young people learn to do skilled work when the traditional entry points are changing?

Kia ora and Happy 2026!

I hope you had an awesome summer break and that your year has started well. The end of 2025 was a whirlwind for me with my keynote at the CATE conference proving to be a great way to cap off the year. It was great to meet so many career educators and I welcome many new folks to this newsletter.

It’s also exciting to see bookings coming in from schools up and down the country with sessions engaging students, whānau and teachers. If you’re interested in exploring our talks and workshops, check out our website and drop me an email to have a chat.

In the meantime, here is my latest piece related to career education and the future of work.

Speak soon, Chris

The decline in graduate positions

Many entry-level tasks, such as data entry, basic research, drafting documents, and routine analysis, are precisely the kinds of work that AI tools now handle well. These tasks were traditionally the runway for junior staff, the way they learned the business while contributing value. When that work can be automated, the runway shortens.

This appears to be resulting in a significant downturn in junior hiring. A global survey of 5,500 business leaders by International Data Corporation (IDC), a leading technology market research firm, found that two-thirds of companies are slowing entry-level hiring as automation expands. Globally, 91% of organisations say AI has already changed or displaced job roles.

The same can be said in New Zealand. Research published by IT Brief NZ found that 87% of New Zealand companies have seen job roles change or disappear due to AI in the past 12 months. A third are already slowing entry-level hiring, and 88% expect to reduce it further over the next three years.

Perhaps most striking: 76% of New Zealand organisations say the opportunity for junior employees to develop through on-the-job learning has diminished. That’s higher than any other country surveyed. If the routine tasks that once helped graduates learn the ropes are now handled by AI, how do newcomers build the experience they need to progress?

This is the real challenge. It’s not that jobs are disappearing entirely. It’s that the pathway into skilled work is being reshaped.

Why junior workers matter more than their skills

Some employers are starting to realise that the value of junior employees goes well beyond the tasks they perform.

Chris Eldridge, CEO of recruitment firm Robert Walters, warns of a “talent doom cycle”: “Entry-level, junior-level roles are the breeding ground for the leadership of the future. I think if you overcut that junior layer, you will have a talent bottleneck at some point in the business that leads invariably to an increase in hiring costs.”

Eldridge points out that young people “absorb the best of a business” including tacit knowledge that can only be passed on through people. “They’re the culture carriers of the future,” he says. Companies that don’t hire young people risk losing touch with their customers and the broader culture.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, has been even more direct. He’s publicly argued that replacing junior workers with AI is “one of the dumbest ideas” a company can have. His reasoning? Junior employees are often the most proficient users of AI tools, having adapted to them during their education. Research suggests over half of Gen Z employees are actively helping senior colleagues upskill in AI. The traditional mentorship model is being flipped: the junior teaches the senior the tool, while the senior teaches the junior the judgement.

Some companies are changing their approach

Globally, some organisations are rethinking how they bring in young talent rather than simply cutting entry-level roles.

Cloudflare has announced plans to hire 1,111 interns in 2026. CEO Matthew Prince explained: “50-year-old CEOs like myself aren’t going to be the ones that teach companies how to take advantage of AI. We need to learn from the next generation.” Meanwhile, law, consulting, and private equity firms are actually doubling down on entry-level hiring, seeing today’s graduates as a rare asset: digitally native, agile, and curious about technology.

Here in Aotearoa, similar behaviours are yet to emerge. Summer of Tech, a programme that has connected tertiary students with tech employers for paid internships since 2006, reported that 2024 saw 40% fewer employers hiring than the previous year, which itself was 40% down on 2022. The NZ Association of Graduate Employers notes that while most graduate programmes remain in place, reduced cohort sizes and tighter budgets are having a clear impact.

Is the struggling economy holding us back? Or is the strategic value of junior talent simply not on the radar of Kiwi companies yet? Either way, it leaves New Zealand graduates in a challenging position.

What this means for how rangatahi demonstrate their capabilities

This reshaping of entry-level work has a direct consequence: what hirers look for in new recruits is changing. When AI can handle the routine tasks that graduates once cut their teeth on, a university degree alone no longer guarantees you’ll get noticed.

The IT Brief NZ research mentioned earlier found that employers are increasingly looking for ways candidates can demonstrate the application of their skills: 61% prioritise problem-solving and critical thinking, and 59% want to see a portfolio of work. While this research is particular to the technology sector, it seems applicable to a variety of other sectors where it is possible to show how you might apply skills to authentic or imagined contexts.

As one university careers advisor told IEEE Spectrum: “If you’re just going to class and doing projects and maybe getting a great GPA, that’s amazing. But you also need to be applying what you’re learning.”

So how might young people demonstrate their capabilities? The traditional approaches still matter: internships, work experience, volunteering, portfolios, and networking. But the bar is rising. It’s no longer enough to simply list these activities on a CV. Students need to think more strategically about how they showcase the application of their skills. This might mean getting creative with portfolios, documenting projects in imagined contexts if real-world opportunities aren’t available. It might mean being more intentional about volunteering, choosing roles that develop and demonstrate specific capabilities rather than just clocking hours. Side projects matter more than ever, not because employers need to see finished products, but because they reveal how someone thinks, solves problems, and takes initiative.

Perhaps most importantly, young people need to develop their own awareness of how AI is reshaping different fields. What are AI agents doing in the sectors they’re interested in? What’s considered cutting edge? This isn’t about becoming an AI expert. It’s about building the kind of situational awareness that helps them imagine how career possibilities might differ from what exists today. Students who can speak knowledgeably about how their chosen field is evolving, and who have thought about what that means for the skills they’re developing, will stand out. This is futures thinking in action: not predicting what will happen, but preparing to navigate whatever does.

The bigger picture

Here’s the conversation I think we need to bring into schools: not “will AI take your job?” but “how will you be good at what you do in an environment where AI tools exist?”

The traditional answer was straightforward: get qualified, start at the bottom, learn from the people above you, work your way up. That pathway isn’t disappearing entirely, but it’s changing. None of this requires predicting exactly what the future holds.

The sky isn’t falling. But the ground is shifting. Young people who can recognise these changes and adapt accordingly will be well placed regardless of which specific predictions come true.

Bring this conversation to your school

We’re now offering “Preparing for Possibility” sessions tailored for:

• Students: Interactive workshops that explode the myth of a single destined future and introduce practical ways to explore new and emerging fields and create plans that are resilient and open to change.
• Parents and whānau: Engaging presentations that bring parents and the wider community into contemporary career planning conversations and help guide teens in uncertain times.
• Staff: Schools keep asking for PLD options and we are happy to discuss what you might need. Futures thinking goes across the curriculum, just like careers education.

Infinite Careers www.infinite.careers admin@education-unleashed.com