Why entry-level jobs are disappearing (and what graduates should actually do about it)
Entry-level job postings in the U.S. have dropped 35% since January 2023. UK tech companies slashed graduate roles by 46% in a single year. A Handshake poll found that 62% of 2025 seniors are worried about AI's impact on their careers.
Those numbers are real. But they're telling an incomplete story.
The graduates who should be worried are the ones pretending nothing is changing. The ones who think their degree alone is enough, that AI is a fad, that things will go back to normal. I've watched that exact mindset play out across four major technology shifts over 27 years. It never ends well for the people who stand still.
What 27 years of tech shifts taught me about AI and careers
I started a web hosting company in the late '90s. Windows shared hosting, which was a niche within a niche at the time. Over the next 27 years, I watched our entire business model get rewritten by technology, not once, but repeatedly.
Shared hosting gave way to dedicated servers. Dedicated gave way to VPS. VPS gave way to cloud. We eventually transitioned into managed IT services, then cybersecurity, and now AI. Each one of those was a hard infrastructure decision that shaped what came next.
Every single one of those transitions followed the same script. New technology shows up. People panic. The early adopters figure out how to use it. And within a few years, the new thing becomes the baseline that everyone is expected to know.
Think about email. We went from email being kind of a cool thing to a must-have. Today, more business happens over email than over the phone. Nobody debates whether email is "real" anymore. Same with mobile. Early on, a mobile-friendly website was a nice-to-have, a secondary consideration. Today, applications and websites are built mobile-first. The afterthought became the starting point.
AI is on that same trajectory. The question isn't whether it will become the default. The question is how fast.
Why AI is a skill multiplier, not a job killer
Here's what most of the doom-and-gloom articles get wrong. They frame AI as a binary: either it takes your job or it doesn't. That misses the point entirely.
AI is a skill multiplier. It takes what you already know and amplifies it.
Don't focus on just what AI can do and what it can't do. Focus on what it can do for you and how it can move you up.
I'll give you a real example. It's going to be extremely hard for a junior programmer to walk into a company and get hired purely on the basis of writing basic code. AI can write basic code. That's just the reality. But if you're a junior programmer who understands the concepts, who knows how software architecture works, who can think through problems, and you're using AI to execute at the level of a senior developer? You just skipped three years of career ladder.
That reframe changes everything. You stop competing against AI and start competing with it on your side. The graduates who figure this out first won't just find jobs. They'll find better jobs than they expected. The same principle applies to businesses trying to figure out where AI fits: the winners focus on augmentation, not replacement.
The AI skills gap is your biggest career opportunity
If you graduated in 2008 and built your portfolio website without considering mobile, nobody blinked. By 2014, if your portfolio wasn't mobile-responsive, you looked out of touch. By 2018, if you weren't designing mobile-first, you weren't getting hired for front-end work.
That transition took about ten years. AI is moving faster.
IBM reported that 87% of executives expect AI to augment jobs rather than replace them. But here's the part people skip over: 47% of those same executives say their employees don't have the AI skills needed. That gap between "we want AI-capable people" and "we can't find AI-capable people" is where the opportunity lives for new graduates.
You're not competing against AI. You're competing against other graduates who haven't figured out how to use it yet.
How to build AI skills that actually get you hired
I'm not going to tell you to "learn prompt engineering" or "take an online AI course." Here's what I'd actually tell a graduate sitting across from me right now.
Pick the tool you use most in your field and find the AI layer for it. If you're in marketing, that might be using AI to draft and iterate on campaign copy in a fraction of the time. If you're in finance, it might be using AI to build financial models or analyze data sets that would have taken you a week. If you're in design, learn how AI tools can accelerate your workflow while you focus on creative direction.
Then build something with it. Don't just learn about AI. Use it to produce work. Build a portfolio project where AI was part of your process. Write about what worked and what didn't. That kind of practical, honest experience with AI tools is worth more in an interview than any certification.
Talk to people who are already using AI in their daily work. Not the influencers posting hot takes on LinkedIn. The people in the trenches. Ask them what's actually useful and what's hype. You'll learn more in a 30-minute conversation than in a week of scrolling.
Your degree plus AI: the career advantage nobody's talking about
Your degree isn't worthless. The knowledge you built in school is the foundation. But a foundation without a building on top of it is just a slab of concrete. AI is the power tool that lets you build faster and higher than any graduating class before you.
Too many people are watching AI and waiting to see what happens. Too many people are burying their heads in the sand, hoping this is a phase. It's not a phase. The .com boom wasn't a phase. Mobile wasn't a phase. And AI isn't going to be one either. If you're a business leader trying to figure out the responsible way to adopt AI, start there. If you're a graduate, start with the steps above.
The graduates who treat AI as a threat will spend the next five years reacting. The ones who treat it as a multiplier will spend those same five years building careers that the first group will envy. Which one are you going to be?
Jess Coburn started building internet infrastructure in the late '90s, spent two decades scaling managed IT and cloud services, wrote the #1 Amazon bestseller on cybersecurity for small businesses, and now helps businesses define their own AI strategy. He's watched every major technology hype cycle up close and writes about which ones actually matter. Subscribe here.