AI Is Killing Entry-Level Jobs: 7 Strategies to Ride the Wave and Accelerate Your Career

The dominant narrative is doomsday: “AI is taking all the jobs!” And the data behind that narrative is real enough to generate legitimate concern. But the story is both more hopeful and more complicated than the data suggest. What we’re actually witnessing is a compression of the traditional career timeline that, navigated intentionally, can accelerate professional growth in ways no previous generation has experienced.

Look for companies that are bucking the trend

Over the recent weeks, there have been signals that some employers are recognizing the danger of choking off their talent pipelines entirely. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that the company will “go heavy” on hiring new college graduates, because they are “AI native.” IBM likewise announced plans to substantially increase entry-level hiring. And Dropbox, Cloudflare, and LinkedIn have all signaled significant expansion of internships, new graduate, and entry-level programs. PWC, which partially rolled back entry-level hiring last year, recommitted itself to it in about 20 percent of its office locations.

What’s happening in my view is this: companies that experimented aggressively with AI are realizing that young, adaptable people are critical to investing in growth and accelerating transformation. A generational age-out is coming. Succession and progression can’t happen if you’re only hiring into mid-career roles.

Work at the skills that AI cannot replicate

On what should new-workforce hopefuls focus? At the risk of stating the obvious, they should focus on the capabilities AI cannot replicate.

This includes relationship-building and its many subsidiary skills: the ability to listen deeply and synthesize what you’ve heard in multiple different offline conversations into something actionable; the ability to negotiate, facilitate a difficult conversation, or tell a compelling story; the ability to exercise judgment when the data is ambiguous; and the ability to read a room or tell an (appropriate) joke.

For human jobs, focus on human skills. Such capabilities have always mattered in leadership, but they typically didn’t develop until mid-career, because early-career professionals were too focused on the kind of work AI now handles. So this career-timeline compression is actually an opportunity. If the rote, lower-level work is being done by AI, new entrants can accelerate their development of these distinctly human skills, learning them much earlier than previous generations did.

Remember, This is Your Superhero Origin Story

I spend a lot of time talking to people in their early twenties, many of whom range from neutral to deeply unhappy in their first jobs. Instead of asking “am I happy?” try a more useful question, like “am I growing?” Look for satisfaction in your increasing competence, in mastering something difficult, in developing abilities in dealing with a wide variety of people.

Importantly, there will be great satisfaction in knowing that a year from now you’ll be able to see how far you’ve come, and where you want to go will become clearer. That’s not the same as happiness but can lead there.

Keep An Ikigai Career Journal

Scott Galloway often says that “follow your passion” is the worst advice you can give a young person. I agree. Most people in their twenties don’t know what their passion is. But they can pay attention. They can notice what piques their curiosity. They can track which parts of a meeting make them lean forward and which make them zone out.

As you wade deeper into a new role, write down where you excel and where you struggle; what energizes you and what drains you. That kind of deliberate self-observation, accumulated over time, is how you find the intersection of what you’re good at, what the business needs, and what you actually enjoy.

Become a Great Mentee

One of the most underrated career skills is learning how to be mentored well. Experienced professionals want to help. But the person being mentored has to bring something to the relationship: respect, curiosity, vulnerability, a genuine willingness to build a connection that goes beyond transactional advice-seeking.

If someone takes the time to share their experience with you and you show up with gratitude, follow-through, and a willingness to be honest about what you’re experiencing, that person will go to bat for you. They’ll make introductions, advocate for your progression, and think of you when opportunities arise. Note also that mentoring is one of the most human dynamics in a professional environment. And it’s one that AI will never replace.

Chart the multilane, mad-scientist career

The side gig was already a fixture of working life long before ChatGPT arrived. And technology, including AI, has continued to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship. You can build a website armed only with a two-paragraph description and an AI tool. Be a mad scientist. You can run a side business while holding a full-time job. You can operate in multiple lanes simultaneously.

For early-career workers who can’t find the entry-level job they want, this is worth exploring. Start something. Experiment. You’re building your own entry-level position. If a hiring manager sees someone who launched a business—even a small one—they’re looking at a person who understands initiative, risk, and execution.

Maintain AI literacy as table stakes

If you’re entering the workforce in 2026, you must be able to use AI effectively to the same degree you once needed to be fluent in the Microsoft and Google office suites. There will be a transition period in which you’ll need competency across both AI and the various legacy toolsets. But AI is not optional. It is a baseline skill, like knowing how to use a spreadsheet twenty years ago.

The good news for those just starting out is that they likely already use AI flexibly, in contrast to seasoned professionals who have approached it with a bit more bias and resistance. Dropbox’s chief people officer, Melanie Rosenwasser, told Bloomberg that, when it comes to early-career workers using AI, “It’s like they’re biking in the Tour de France, and the rest of us still have training wheels.”

But AI proficiency alone isn’t enough. The experienced professional who combines deep business acumen, strong relationships, and AI fluency is nearly uncatchable. What that means for new entrants and aspirants is that basic AI skills will be expected and your differentiator will be the human capabilities you develop alongside it.

The case for optimism

I’m optimistic about this generation. Gen Z is more socially aware, more globally connected, and more principled than perhaps any generation before them. They won’t sacrifice themselves for a broken system. There’s something powerful in that.

The world they’re entering is turbulent. The rules are changing. But they have a chance to build careers that are more varied, more self-directed, and more human than anything my generation has experienced. What such a career asks of us, however, is a willingness to be curious, to invest in the skills that matter most, and to ride this wave rather than let it wash us away.

The entry-level job you imagined may not exist anymore. But the opportunity has never been bigger. And this requires bigger thinking, bigger doing, and bigger leadership.