Why junior talent risks being locked out of experience

Ask a room of leaders what AI is doing to entry-level work and you’ll hear the same worry: the bottom rung of the ladder is being sawn off. That’s the wrong thing to watch.

 

AI is automating tasks, but it’s also creating opportunities for early-career employees to focus on higher-value work, problem-solving and collaboration. Our recent research found that while 29% of employees expect entry-level roles to decline, 36% believe AI will shift these positions towards more strategic and impactful responsibilities.

 

So, the shortage isn’t opportunity. It’s experience. Junior talent is being handed bigger work earlier, while the everyday tasks that taught them how organisations actually function move quietly to machines. As AI reshapes how work is done, organisations must rethink how those skills get built.

 

 

AI is changing how experience is built

Entry-level work isn’t vanishing. It’s being emptied of the tasks people used to learn from, which is a harder problem to spot and a slower one to fix.

 

These tasks are often the repetitive and process-driven activities that have traditionally occupied a significant portion of early-career roles. While they may have seemed routine, they gave young professionals valuable exposure to how organisations operate, how decisions are made and how work gets done in practice.

 

As AI takes on more of this work, organisations cannot assume these skills will develop naturally. Early-career employees need deliberate opportunities to gain exposure to different parts of the business, learn from experienced colleagues and build confidence through coaching, collaboration and real-world challenges.

 

At the same time, the nature of entry-level work is shifting. Success will depend less on routine execution and more on critical thinking, adaptability and effective collaboration. Our research found that 41% of managers expect AI to accelerate how quickly entry-level employees take on higher-level responsibilities. That’s the tension: we’re asking people to contribute at a higher level earlier while reshaping the routes that used to get them ready.

 

Organisations that get this right will redesign early-career development alongside how work itself is changing, so AI adds to learning instead of quietly subtracting from it.

 

Why experience gaps become capability gaps

Removing entry-level roles because AI can absorb the work looks like a clean win on this year’s numbers. It is also a decision to borrow against capability the organisation hasn’t built yet, and the repayment comes due in three to five years, when there is nobody ready for the manager layer.

 

Very few leaders make that trade on purpose. Foundational roles have long built the technical and human skills that are difficult to teach in a classroom: confidence, workplace fluency, communication and the ability to work well with both people and technology. Cut the roles and the savings land immediately. The missing capability lands later, in a different budget cycle, usually filed under a tight labour market rather than a choice made years earlier.

 

By then the options are expensive. Organisations buy mid-level talent from outside at a premium, competing with every other company that made the same call, and promote people who hold the title without the reps behind it. Neither closes the gap, and both cost more than developing the people already in the building would have.

 

This never gets decided in a single meeting. It happens one open role at a time, each one defensible on its own. Which is why the trade deserves to be priced out loud: what are we saving this year, what are we giving up in five, and what would it take to protect both?

 

 

Building structured development into work

The good news is that all three questions have answers, and none of them requires keeping roles that no longer make sense.

 

Start by pricing what you actually have. Only 11% of employees in our research report receive formal skills assessments, which means most organisations are making this trade blind. They know what a role costs. They do not know which capabilities are thin, which teams are one departure away from a gap, or which of those entry-level roles were quietly doing the development work for the whole function. Skills visibility is a core part of effective skills management. It turns the decision from a headcount line into a capability decision, and it is the only way to see the five-year cost while there is still time to do something about it.

 

Then work out what the automated tasks were teaching and put that back deliberately. The tasks are gone; the learning they delivered is not optional. That means giving early-career employees exposure to different parts of the business, a view into how decisions actually get made, and problems where the answer is not already known. Development should build judgement, not just technical fluency, because judgement is the thing the old tasks were quietly producing.

 

Managers decide whether any of this holds. They are the ones who bring a junior colleague into the meeting rather than sending the notes afterwards, who give feedback that stings a little, and who hand over work slightly beyond what someone has done before. Leaders should make that part of the job and measure it, or it will lose every week to more urgent things.

 

Protecting both sides of the trade depends on connecting these efforts. Effective skills management links how skills are identified, built, applied and measured across the employee lifecycle, capability stops being a by-product of headcount and becomes something you can plan, fund and prove. That is what lets you take the efficiency AI offers this year without mortgaging the talent bench you will need later.

 

 

Preparing future talent

Time on the job used to do the teaching. AI has ended that arrangement, and the organisations still counting on it are carrying a bill they have not seen yet.

 

The trade is not forced. The savings AI makes available this year can be taken while the experience it displaces gets rebuilt on purpose, through deliberate exposure and problems that carry real stakes. What that takes is someone willing to raise the five-year cost in the same meeting where the one-year saving gets signed off. The organisations that do will still have a bench when everyone else is bidding for one. 

 

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Leena Rinne is VP, Product Portfolio at Skillsoft

 

 

Main image courtesy of iStockphoto.con metamorworks