The bottom rung is disappearing... and nobody can tell juniors what to do about it
Everyone is talking about how AI is reshaping careers... almost no one can tell a junior what to actually do about it.
I spend most of my week around early-career folks through Earlywork, and to be honest, this is the question I find hardest to answer right now.
The oldest catch-22, now on hard mode
Juniors have always been stuck in the same loop.
You need experience to get the job, but you need the job to get experience.
What's new is that the jobs that used to hand out that experience are the exact ones disappearing first.
Graduate intakes are shrinking as mid-level workers get more done with AI, and the tasks juniors used to cut their teeth on get absorbed upward.
Overall unemployment is still low, which makes the whole thing feel invisible, because on paper things look fine.
But under the surface, the entry level of the market is quietly falling apart.
The firms will be fine
Services make up ~75% of Australia's workforce, so think about where entry-level service roles sit today:
- Law → the paralegal
- Investment banking → the analyst building pitch decks and comps
- Accounting → the junior bookkeeper
These are largely tick-box jobs. Structured, repeatable, process-driven, which is exactly the work LLMs and agents are getting very good at, very fast.
Here's the thing: I don't think these firms die. I think a lot of them thrive.
Leaner teams, a lower cost base and cheaper rates passed on to clients, while staying highly competitive.
The economic model just changes shape. Smaller pyramids, fatter margins at the top, less room at the bottom.
So where do all those juniors go?
The traditional model of professional services assumes you grind as a junior, learn the craft and climb the ladder.
That only works if there's a bottom rung to stand on.
If there's no bottom rung, where does the next generation of partners come from?
I don't think anyone has a good answer to that yet.
Where do young people turn for help?
When young people go looking for guidance, the options aren't great:
- Unis are supposed to balance workforce needs, but historically they've been far too slow to adapt, and plenty are probably still running coding exams on paper
- Parents and older mentors want to help, but they don't necessarily have the right information for a generation facing a completely different game
- High school careers advisers, in a lot of cases, have less than zero idea (sorry!)
The degree itself has also lost its monopoly.
For decades it was the cleanest signal an employer had. You got into a good uni, finished something hard across multiple years, and that meant something.
Now you can write code, build a product and ship an app without a lecturer, a campus or a HECS debt.
The young folks being watched most closely aren't the ones with the best GPAs. They're the ones who spent the last two years building things on the side.
What I'd actually tell someone today
Even those of us who work in early careers (like me!) don't have a fully formed answer yet.
But a few things feel clearer than they did a year ago.
Explore first, then get uncomfortably specific. Try a few domains early, pay attention to what you actually enjoy rather than what looks good, and once you find the thing, double down and don't be afraid to go narrow.
Build proof, not just credentials. AI has made broad knowledge a commodity, so being passably good at lots of things is worth less every month. Deep domain knowledge, a real network and something you've actually shipped are not.
Pick a growing market. You'd far rather capture a big slice of something expanding than be drowned trying to be 0.01% better than everyone at something the whole world is chasing.
I don't think anyone has this fully figured out yet, me included. But if you're early in your career and feeling a bit lost, my DMs are always open.