College Grads, AI Is Changing Your Job Hunt: Here's How to Stand Out in a Shifting Market

Navigating the Job Market as a College Senior

It's that time of year when college seniors are itching to graduate and looking forward to their first jobs out of school. But they're facing uncertainty in the job market. In fall 2025, a widely watched survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers predicted a bad employment outlook for spring graduates. But recently, an updated survey showed a turnaround, with employers expected to boost new-graduate hires.

Katie Jolicoeur, director of Career Services at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is helping soon-to-be college grads navigate the job market. She shared her insights on how students can adapt to the changing landscape.

College graduates in the class of 2026 are facing an uncertain job market.

The Current Job Market Landscape

The job market appears to be doing an upturn, but there is a little uncertainty with some employers in terms of how AI plays into things. Are we removing or changing our first destination, first jobs out of college? So there's a little uncertainty there.

And then, we've got kind of turbulent economic times happening that's making people a little uncertain. However, what I've been telling students is if you keep an open mind, there are a lot of industries that are hiring a lot of people, especially in regions like Minnesota. Between manufacturing and agriculture, there's a lot of opportunity.

Transferable Skills Are Key

Especially for students, if they know—if they have strong communication skills, teamwork, leadership skills, if they've done any internships, part-time work, volunteer work, working in student organizations, that all lends to what we look at as human or soft skills. And those are the skills that are in demand across every industry.

Obviously, a student with a communications major might not be able to move into an engineering role, but they certainly could work within manufacturing or agriculture or even an engineering company, but work more on the human resources side or frontline customer service sales, stuff like that. It's just on the student to be able to demonstrate how their skill set and their experiences connect to those things on the other side.

The Role of AI in Entry-Level Jobs

AI really can't touch the soft skills. Across the board, we're always going to need to have a human touch to things, and AI has not come so far yet that it's taken over a lot of things that our new graduates can do. So it's having some influence, but what I've been letting students know is even though we've trained them to not use AI to do their assignments, know they use AI to help accomplish things, either in their internships or with their score, whether it's proofreading, editing. If know how to use AI, they should talk about that in their interview, especially how to use it appropriately and ethically and really effectively. Knowing what prompts to use can be very beneficial to them, especially when approaching an employer.

A lot of entry-level positions almost see them being tweaked to where either AI is built into the minimum qualifications or the expectations of the job, which some students may not—they don't feel comfortable doing that right out of the gate. But if they can quickly learn how to do it, that's going to benefit them.

The other thing, too, that I've been telling students is you've just got done with college, but that doesn't mean you're done learning. What employers want is that ability and desire to continue learning. Because I mean, I've been in the field for 20 years. If I had just stopped learning, I wouldn't have a job.

Practical AI Skills to Develop

How are they using AI to maybe act as a personal assistant for them with their Outlook calendars, or how are they leveraging things to automate a lot of the basic stuff that they would normally do? How are they automating some of their emails? That way—I feel like we're all being expected to do more. So then, how do they use AI to take some of that stuff off of their plate?

And here at Mankato, we are having discussions about AI and how to use it on our campus and how to—there have already been workshops for students on how do you create a prompt that's effective. So we're already working with students to try and help them with that because it's coming, and—it's not coming. It's already here. So we want to make sure that they're ready for the job market.

Main Advice for Students

The thing that I told or I've been telling them—and it's funny because I kind of—it reminds me of back in 2008, 2009 when I first started. The thing I repeated over and over to students and had them hopefully understand was, you're not alone. Talk to your friends. Talk to your family. I can guarantee you, you're not the only person walking around out there without a job right now.

And also, don't stop making connections. So a lot of effort has been put in on our campus in the last year to get more employers to our campus to engage with the students in person, and not just once, but multiple times. So we've increased our employer engagement by almost 40% this year, brought employers to campus. They're doing programming with students. And the students are networking because at the end of the day, like, employers are also trying to wade through fake applications. Know the person who's applying, they can help them on the other side get their application through.