As millions of students get ready to graduate this spring, their prospects for landing that first job that helps launch their careers is looking dimmer.
In addition to an economy that’s slowing amid tariff-induced uncertainty, artificial intelligence is threatening entry-level work that traditionally has served as stepping stones, according to LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, who likened the shift to the decline of manufacturing in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates has been rising faster than for other workers in past few years, Raman pointed out, though there isn’t definitive evidence yet that AI is the cause of the weak job market.
But changes rippling through certain sectors today are likely heading for others in the future, with office jobs due to feel the biggest impact, Raman predicted.
“While the technology sector is feeling the first waves of change, reflecting A.I.’s mass adoption in this field, the erosion of traditional entry-level tasks is expected to play out in fields like finance, travel, food and professional services, too,” he said.
To fix entry-level work, Raman called for colleges to incorporate AI across their curricula and for companies to give junior roles higher-level tasks.
“There is a lot of power in the junior employees, but you can’t leverage them the same way that you would in the past,” he said, noting that he looks for curiosity and resilience when hiring.
But Indeed’s findings show that “for about two-thirds of all jobs, 50% or more of those skills are things that today’s generative AI can do reasonably well, or very well.”
“It seems it’s a much smaller and much slower transition than you might imagine if you had just studied the technology’s potential in a vacuum,” University of Chicago economics professor Anders Humlum, one of the NBER study authors, previously told Fortune.
