The ladder is losing its bottom rung
Entry-level work has always included a lot of repetition. Draft the first report. Clean the first spreadsheet. Write the first test. Summarize the first document. AI can now do a passable version of all of it.
That creates a labor-market problem hiding inside a productivity win. If junior employees get fewer chances to practice, the pipeline of senior talent weakens.
What candidates should do
A certificate is not enough. Build proof. Show a workflow you improved, a small product you shipped, a dataset you cleaned, a hiring funnel you analyzed, or a support process you automated.
The signal employers want is not that you can use AI. It is that you can use AI and still think.
What employers should do
Treat AI as part of the apprenticeship. Give juniors harder review tasks earlier: evaluate outputs, compare approaches, document failures, and explain tradeoffs.
Companies that redesign junior work will build talent faster. Companies that simply cut junior roles will discover, in a few years, that senior people do not appear by magic.