For the past few years, the global conversation around artificial intelligence has centered on a singular, terrifying question regarding whether robots will take our jobs. We obsess over unemployment statistics and picture a future where humans are obsolete. Amidst this focus on the quantity of jobs, we often overlook a significant shift regarding the quality of careers.
The primary threat of AI involves burning the bridge that connects entry-level work to expert status. AI is effectively dismantling the career ladder rather than destroying the job market entirely.
The Death Of The “Rep”
To understand this, we have to look at how professional mastery is built. For decades, the path to becoming an expert followed a predictable curve. You started at the bottom, doing the grunt work.
Junior lawyers spent years reviewing tedious contracts. Junior developers wrote simple, repetitive boilerplate code. Junior marketers wrote hundreds of subject lines before finding one that worked.
We often complained about this work and called it drudgery. In hindsight, this drudgery served a vital purpose. It was “learning by osmosis.” By struggling through the basics, junior employees absorbed the fundamental logic of their craft.
They learned what a good contract looks like by reading a thousand bad ones. They learned how systems break by fixing tiny bugs. AI automates this learning process. Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot can now handle that foundational work in seconds.
This creates massive efficiency gains for the company, yet it also hollows out the learning pipeline. We are removing the gym where the next generation of leaders was supposed to build their muscles. When the “boring” work disappears, the training ground disappears with it.
The Trap Of Non-Linear Experience
This leads to a second problem where we create a workforce defined by non-linear experience.
Historically, workers moved from apprentice to journeyman to master. Today, AI allows a novice to jump straight to the role of “overseer.” A junior employee creates a prompt for an AI to do the work and then reviews the output.
This looks like empowerment on the surface. Suddenly, a twenty-two-year-old can produce work that previously required a senior level of competence. This creates a very fragile type of expertise.
This “fragile expertise” becomes dangerous when things go wrong. When an AI hallucinates or makes a subtle, structural error, it takes deep, foundational knowledge to spot it. If the human in the loop skipped the foundational learning phase, they will miss the error.
They won’t even know where to look for it. We are handing the keys to high-speed vehicles to drivers who never learned to drive a manual transmission car.
The End Of Internal Compounding
This ladder-breaking phenomenon spells trouble for organisational health. Companies have historically relied on “internal compounding.” You hire young, hungry talent, train them in your specific ways of working, and ten years later, you have a leader who carries the institution’s DNA.
Without a functional career ladder, this organic growth becomes difficult. Juniors cannot cut their teeth on entry-level tasks because the AI does them. Consequently, they never develop the context needed to become seniors.
This forces organisations into a state of external dependency. Firms will struggle to promote from within because their internal talent pool is full of “overseers” rather than experts. They will be forced to hire expensive senior talent externally or rely heavily on consultants to fill the knowledge gap.
This creates a mercenary culture. The deep institutional memory regarding why a decision was made five years ago fades away. The organisation becomes a collection of tools and contractors rather than a cohesive body of developing professionals.
The Missing Middle
We need to shift our questions from potential unemployment to how we will train the experts of tomorrow. If the bottom rungs of the ladder are sawed off by automation, climbing to the top becomes nearly impossible.
The challenge for the next decade focuses on reinventing apprenticeship. We have to find new ways to transfer tacit knowledge to the next generation. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in a world full of managers with no one left who actually knows how to do the work.
Source – https://inc42.com/resources/why-ai-will-not-kill-jobs-but-will-kill-career-ladders/