What Happens When AI Takes Entry Level Jobs Away From College Graduates?
If you have a kid in college, you should be alarmed by the recent headline “ChatGPT will most likely impact your job if you work in tech, went to college, and make up to $80,000 a year” It certainly caught my attention.
You only have to go back 5 years to hear the cry of governors, school boards, and employers saying coding should be a requirement for all students. Now Artificial IntelligenceI turns natural language into code! Chat GPT could get hired as an entry level coder if it interviewed for a job at Google! But wait–that’s the job my kid is going for!
I’m not a doomsday person who believes all the jobs are going away. Artificial Intelligence will be a significant disruptor for sure. It will most certainly increase productivity, efficiency, and probably delight customers on a number of fronts. However, if automation came after blue collar jobs, AI is coming after white collar jobs. People with bachelors and masters degrees will take the hit. If we believe a college degree (and the big $ associated with that education) are key to getting a good entry level job (not to mention some higher level jobs), we may have another thing coming.
No one can say for certain which jobs will stay, evolve, or be eliminated. McKinsey estimates that 60%-70% of a typical worker’s tasks during the day could be automated by AI. Currently, around 25% of “total work time” consists of natural language related tasks that could be handled by AI. And, you guessed it, a bunch of that work is what we typically hire newly minted college graduates to do.
According to McKinsey, the jobs most likely to be impacted are customer operations; marketing and sales; software engineering; and research and development. We know those jobs will be enhanced by AI and we will need humans, with great communication, empathy, and critical thinking skills to work alongside the AI.
New jobs will require humans to handle escalated customer support calls, last mile sales negotiations, and leverage people to review for bias and accuracy in the marketing materials. These are the jobs we promote people into, not the entry level jobs/skills we expect students to have. Today college grads spend 2–3 years working like robots mastering Excel modeling for investment banking firms. Now AI can do that work. Where will a college graduate start in the workforce in 2, 3, or 4 years from now?
What does the new entry level job look like? What happens when good entry level jobs students are placed in today, like customer service, sales, coding and marketing, end up requiring human skills people spend years developing on the job? How will they prepare for this future in school? Are we also looking at the new renaissance for vocational jobs like construction? As technology continues to move so quickly will we see more learning and work happening side by side, versus the linear 4 year degree?
One thing is certain — students will need to continue to develop all types of skills in and outside of school. Showing up on time, communicating effectively with people, using judgment to analyze information are skills that will become even more important as we are required to work with and alongside AI. Microsoft’s Work Trends Index Report lists the following as essential skills:
- Analytical judgment
- Flexibility
- Emotional Intelligence
- Intellectual curiosity
- Bias detection and handling
- AI delegation (prompts)
Maybe you are already wondering how schools will prepare students for those $300k prompt engineer jobs that don’t require technology skills- or maybe you are just curious for your own next career move! Schools are already trying to figure out how to deal with AI on multiple levels. Rather than ban AI tools, perhaps schools should be embracing these tools so students not only gain exposure and experience using them, but also figure out what they need to do on a human level to improve what is produced? If AI is available and in use, how does this change what is taught and assessed?
Work experience will continue to be key to students developing these skills. People build emotional intelligence and critical thinking in lots of ways. Processing directions, meeting deadlines, asking questions, and solving challenges that come up along the way are skills and capabilities we build in and outside of the classroom.
The type of work may change, but that’s even more reason to expose students early and often to the changing landscape of jobs, including how work is done, and how they can insert themselves in the most valuable way. The more opportunities to experience different types of work in different ways (internships, gig work, etc) the better. And don’t wait until senior year! Work is changing quickly. Being exposed to work as a freshman, building human skills, and experiencing how work changes from year to year will be key to preparing for life after graduation.
What do new entry level jobs look like? No one knows for sure. Maybe that’s why “flexibility” is on the skills list!
